Deductions from 
The World War 

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Baron von Freytag-Loringhoven 



DEDUCTIONS FROM 
THE WORLD WAR 



BY 



BARON VON FREYTAG-LORINGHOVEN 

LIEUTENANT-GENEHAL 

AND 

DEPUTY CHIEF OF THE GERMAN IMPERIAL STAIY 



n^ 



G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS 

NEW YORK AND LONDON 

^be 1?nfcfterbocfter press 

1918 






-^^.^ 



Copyright, 1918 

BY 

G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS, New York 
Copyright 

BY 

CONSTABLE & CO., Ltd., London 




Ube 'Rntcfterbocftct press, Hew Jfforft 



INTRODUCTORY NOTE 

Baron von Freytag - Loringhoven, the 
author of this book, is the most distinguished 
soldier-writer of Prussia. In other words, 
since none will dispute Prussia her mili- 
tarism, he is the most distinguished liv- 
ing writer on militarism in theory and 
practice. 

Freytag comes of a Baltic family. He 
was born in Russia, the son of a Russian 
diplomatist, and he served in the Russian 
Army before, at the age of twenty-one, he 
joined a Prussian Guard Regiment. Be- 
fore the war he was an influential member 
of the General Staff in Berlin, and had 
made a reputation by his writings on the 
history and science of war. On the out- 
break of war he became the German repre- 
sentative on the Austro-Hungarian General 



iv INTRODUCTORY NOTE 

Staff. The military weakness of Austria 
has in recent years been a commonplace 
in Berlin, and Freytag duly tells us how the 
^^ brave troops*' of the Dual Monarchy "had 
to suffer for the sins and omissions of 
which the Parliaments had been guilty*' 
When Count Moltke, the Chief of the Ger- 
man General Staff, was superseded by 
Falkenhayn, after the failure of the original 
German offensive in the West, Freytag 
became Quartermaster-General in the field, 
and Moltke became Deputy Chief of the 
General Staff — that is to say, head of such 
parts of the General Staff Organization as 
remain in Berlin, while the main business 
of the General Staff is conducted from 
"Great Headquarters** in the field. 

At the beginning of August, igi6, Fal- 
kenhayn was superseded in his turn by 
Hindenburg, after the German failure at 
Verdun. Freytag*s post of Quartermaster- 
General was merged in the larger post which 
was now created for Ludendorff, and. 



INTRODUCTORY NOTE v 

Moltke having died in June, Freytag was 
appointed in September^ lQi6, to the post, 
which he still holds, of Deputy Chief of, 
the General Staff. 

Shortly before his appointment, Frey- 
tag s position as chief writer to the Prussian 
Army was put beyond dispute by his decora- 
tion with the Order Pour le Merite {Peace 
Class). The Order Pour le Merite {Mili- 
tary Class) was founded by Frederick the 
Great, and has now been conferred upon 
innumerable Prussian officers. Freytag 
is apparently the only officer who has re- 
ceived during the present war the Order 
Pour le Merite {Peace Class), which was 
founded by Frederick William IF in 1842, 
and is conferred for distinction in *' Science 
and Arts.** 

"DEDUCTIONS FROM THE 
WORLD WAR *' was written for German 
consumption. As soon as a few German 
newspaper reviews called attention to its 
contents, and especially to the chapters 



vi INTRODUCTORY NOTE 

^' The Army in the Future'^ and "Still 
Ready for JVar," with their candid explana- 
tion of the way in which Germany proposes, 
this war finished, to prepare for the next, 
all comment was restricted or suppressed. 
Circulation of the book in Germany was 
promoted, hut its export was prohibited, 
and very few copies have found their way 
across the frontier. 

This book is interesting as an attempt 
to lay the foundations of "history" ; it is 
comparable with the "popular edition" 
of Moltke's "History of the Franco-German 
War of i8yo," upon which a whole genera- 
tion of Germany was brought up, while the 
real history of the war was being written 
in France — for posterity. The book is 
very instructive as a denunciation of inter- 
national ideals and as a warning of the 
plans which are being made in Berlin for 
the cold and reasoned application of the 
lessons of the war and the development of 
a still more scientific military system, a still 



INTRODUCTORY NOTE vii 

more perfect zvar-machine, than existed in 
1914. Again, we have here, on the best 
possible authority, the warning that Ger- 
many — with all her avowed indignation at 
the idea of an economic ^^ war after the war'* 
— is determined not only to rebuild her 
military system, but to build it this time 
upon an indestructible economic foundation. 
But above all Freytags book is a revelation 
because he says what Germany thinks. 
*'War has its basis in human nature,** he 
writes, "and as long as human nature re- 
mains unaltered, war will continue to 
exist, as it has existed already for thousands 
of years.*' That view is universal in Ger- 
many, and to the German people Freytag s 
deductions will seem to be only logic and 
common sense. In reality, Freytag the 
soldier says nothing a whit stronger in 
praise of militarism than is said in his apt 
quotations from Prince Billow the civilian. 
Militarism is not a Prussian invention; 
militarism is Prussia herself. And so 



viii INTRODUCTORY NOTE 

long as Prussia rules Germany^ all talk 
that seeks to distinguish '^war parties^* 
from "peace parties,*' "militarists'* from 
"statesmen" is misleading. 

J. E. M. 

December, iQiy. 



AUTHOR'S FOREWORD 

It may seem presumptuous to draw 
conclusions from the World War while it 
is still in progress. And yet it is impera- 
tive that we should be clear in regard to 
a number of questions which have pre- 
sented themselves as a result of the War. 
We must look for their solution in the 
State and the Army. The War must 
admonish us to submit our whole national 
life and our military organisation to an ex- 
amination in the light of the experiences 
which we have gained. Such an examina- 
tion cannot and should not be much 
longer postponed. 

Without clear views and an adequate 
understanding of the major sequences of 
the War, not only as regards operations 
and tactics, but also as regards world- 



X AUTHOR'S FOREWORD 

politics and world-economics, without 
carefully balancing the new experience 
that it has brought us against all that it 
has confirmed and that has to be main- 
tained, we shall not be in a position to 
draw accurate deductions for the future. 
Towards this the writer hopes to contri- 
bute by means of the following arguments. 
They are addressed equally to the Army 
and the nation. 



CONTENTS 

CHAP. ^AGB 

Introductory Note . . . iii 

Author's Foreword . . . ix 

I. The Political and Economic Situ- 
ation OF THE Central Powers i 

II. The Psychology of National 

and Massed Warfare . . 21 

III. The Influence of Technical 

Science 56 

IV. Leadership . . • .81 

V. The Army in the Future . . 129 

VI. Still Ready for War . . 201 



DEDUCTIONS FROM THE 
WORLD WAR 



THE POLITICAL AND ECONOMIC SITUATION 
OF THE CENTRAL POWERS 

The grouping of the Powers at the 
beginning and still more during the course 
of the World War has been extremely 
unfavourable to the Central Powers. We 
must go back to the desperate struggle 
of Frederick the Great in the Seven 
Years' War to find anything comparable 
to it. Napoleon, too, found himself at 
length pitted against all Europe, but the 
comparative strength of the opposed 
forces at the beginning of the autumn 
campaign of 1813 was by no means un- 



2 DEDUCTIONS FROM 

favourable to him. The AHies at that 
time possessed only an insignificant su- 
periority of numbers. Moreover, our 
enemies have not had to endure what 
Field-Marshal Count Schlieffen in 1909 
justly deduced from the history of pre- 
vious coalition wars : 

"Even when all objections have been 
disposed of, every difficulty overcome, 
even when resolution is ripened, and a 
powerful advance from all sides is about 
to be set on foot, yet in the breast of 
every individual the anxious question will 
still arise: Will the others come? Will 
our distant Allies take their stand at the 
right time?" ' 

Not only did all the Allies take their 
stand, but, in addition, they were rein- 
forced by our former allies, Italy and 
Roumania, while America showed herself 
more and more clearly a secret ally of the 
Entente Powers, rendering the most valu- 

' Detitsche Revue, January, 1909. 



THE WORLD WAR 3 

able services by furnishing them with all 
manner of requisites of war and pecuniary 
loans, long before she openly took up her 
stand against us in February, 19 17, by 
severing diplomatic relations and in April 
by declaring a state of war. However 
valuable to Germany and Austria-Hun- 
gary has been the alliance of Turkey and 
later of Bulgaria, an equilibrium of forces 
could not, of course, be effected by means 
of these States. England has been suc- 
cessful in keeping the Entente together, 
and has utilised the fact that the destruc- 
tion of the Central Powers proved to be 
far more difficult than had been antici- 
pated in order to strengthen the bond 
between herself and her Allies. They had 
involved themselves in a common under- 
taking, which had not prospered accord- 
ing to expectations. Now there was no 
alternative but to carry it through, for 
to give it up would be equivalent to a 
confession of utter failure and defeat. 



4 DEDUCTIONS FROM 

The ties which bound the Continental 
AlHes to England were constantly rein- 
forced by the promise held out of terri- 
torial acquisitions, as well as by monetary 
aids. In this connection England's favour- 
able position in world-politics and world- 
economics stood her in noticeably good 
stead. The more the prospect vanished 
of inflicting on us a military defeat with 
the aid of the blockade, the more England 
strengthened her endeavour to secure 
that we should at any rate find ourselves 
after the War in an unfavourable eco- 
nomic position, both geographically and 
in respect of commercial treaties. Eng- 
land gave expression to her desire for 
war and victory by creating a strong land- 
army, finally adopting the system of 
universal service. In so doing she broke 
with her traditional custom of waging 
Continental wars to all intents and pur- 
poses by means of the armies of her Allies. 
In the wars against Louis XIV England 



THE WORLD IVAR 5 

had already raised herself to the position 
of a great Colonial Power and had won 
for herself supremacy on the sea. As a 
result of the Seven Years' War, she 
became a World -Power. It was not, 
however, until the American War of Inde- 
pendence that she entered upon a period 
of world-policy and world-economics. It 
has justly been said:^ 

"World -trade there had long been, 
but not world-policy. Not even Eng- 
land possessed the latter, in spite of her 
world-embracing settlements and domin- 
ions. In fact there existed only Euro- 
pean policy. World-policy could only 
come into being when in the other con- 
tinents, as well as in our own, indepen- 
dent and permanent centres, capable of 
asserting themselves against the Euro- 
pean Great Powers, had shaped for 
themselves a State existence. This hap- 

' Alexander v. Peetz. Introduction to Weltpolitische 

Neuhildungen, by Paul Dehn. 



6 DEDUCTIONS FROM 

pened in the eighteenth and nineteenth 
centuries in the case of xA.merica, and in 
the twentieth century in the case of 
Japan." 

In the European Continental wars up 
to 1870-71, when we were still predomi- 
nantly an agrarian State, questions of 
world-policy and world - economics had 
played a comparatively subordinate role. 
It has been the development of our trade, 
combined with the increase of our popu- 
lation, which, in the course of this World 
War, has thrown into special prominence 
the significance of these questions in rela- 
tion to our Fatherland. The import of 
raw materials, foodstuffs, and manufac- 
tured articles, the export of the products 
of our industries, had become essential 
conditions of our economic life. In re- 
gard to these questions the outbreak of 
the World War found us insufficiently 
prepared. Such measures as we had taken 
were shown to be inadequate. Hence 



THE WORLD fVAR 7 

in our conduct of the War we were faced 
with a difficult problem, which had not 
arisen in the case of previous wars on 
the European mainland. We found our- 
selves not only at such a disadvantage 
in regard to the general political situation 
as we had not hitherto experienced, and, 
as a consequence of this, faced with an 
overwhelming superiority of numbers, 
but also we had to grapple with an eco- 
nomic situation as difficult as could pos- 
sibly be imagined. This is not the place 
to examine how far, in view of the all too 
rapid growth of her trade, world-policy 
and world-economics may have been pre- 
mature in the case of Germany, inasmuch 
as our continental position was still by 
no means sufficiently assured. Here 
Ranke's words are applicable: "Who can 
control circumstances, calculate future 
events, govern the surging of the ele- 
ments?"^ Even the power of prevision 

' Ursprung des Siebenjdhrigen Krieges. 



8 DEDUCTIONS FROM 

attributed to great men is after all very 
limited. Friedjung^ remarks justly that 
the real necessity of events and of all 
which we assert to have taken place in 
accordance with the laws of history only 
becomes apparent when the history of 
the world is considered in large epochs; 
that, for the rest, history is an ingenious 
tissue of necessity and chance, and that 
to estimate future events is consequently 
hardly possible even for the most clear- 
sighted contemporary observers. Hence 
diplomats have often been unjustly ac- 
cused of furnishing an incorrect report 
in regard to a foreign country, concerning 
which they were supposed to possess an 
exact knowledge. Even the most per- 
fect knowledge of a country does not 
endow its possessor with the capacity to 
foresee coming events, although, of course, 
the gift of exact observation exists in 

* Der Kampf um die Vorherrschaft in Deutschland, 
Introduction to Vol. II. 



THE WORLD IVAR 9 

different degrees in different individuals. 
It might well be imagined that, in this 
age of extreme publicity, it should be easy 
enough to form a trustworthy estimate of 
a foreign country and its armed power. 
The Press and the proceedings of Parliar 
ment furnish a host of details from which 
to build up a complete picture, but 
whether this picture will prove accurate 
in case of war is a matter of doubt, for 
many unforeseen accidents, notably those 
resulting from the power of personality, 
are in such matters peculiarly likely to 
affect the issue. Thus the abundance of 
news which we have at our disposal at the 
present day may easily, serve only to 
obscure and distract. 

The consequences of the blockade to 
which the Central Powers were subjected 
made themselves felt at once. Although 
we have succeeded by our own might in 
developing and carrying on our economic 
life during the War, none the less the dis- 



10 DEDUCTIONS FROM 

advantages of our economic position in 
the world have made themselves felt all 
the time. They alone explain the fact 
that new opportunities of resistance con- 
stantly revealed themselves to our oppo- 
nents, because the sea was open to them, 
and that victories which formerly would 
have been absolutely decisive, and the 
conquest of whole kingdoms, still brought 
us no nearer to peace. Thus was Russia 
able to recover from the severe defeats 
of the summer of 19 15 and to attack once 
more in the following year with newly- 
equipped armies. 

Though the American Admiral Mahan, 
in his famous book. The Influence of Sea- 
Pozver on History, summed up the result 
of the Seven Years' War as follows: On 
the sea, immense success and material 
gain for England, on land, enormous 
sacrifice of men, with the sole result that 
the status quo was maintained ; though he 
asserts, moreover, that the British fleet 



THE WORLD WAR ii 

contributed most towards the overthrow 
of Napoleon by cutting him off from the 
most important of all sources for replenish- 
ing supplies, namely, the sea, the question 
of sea-power was not really of decisive 
importance in those times. Pitt, in his 
speech in Parliament against the Peace 
of Paris of 1763, already emphasised 
the fact that North America had been 
conquered for England in Germany. 
Napoleon was defeated on land. The 
Continental States of that time, pre-emi- 
nently France, were still agrarian States, 
and far better able than now to suffice for 
their own needs for a long time. In our 
days of world-policy and world-economics, 
the views of the famous naval writer are 
far more in accordance with actuality. 
The fact that we have resorted to sub- 
marine warfare as a means of self-defence 
is in itself a proof of it. The unsparing 
application of this new weapon will 
hasten materially the end of this mighty 



12 DEDUCTIONS FROM 

economic conflict, by means of the eco- 
nomic difficulties which it will create for 
our opponents and for neutrals. The 
World War affords incontrovertible proof 
that Germany must for all time to come 
maintain her claim to sea-power. We 
need not at present discuss by what 
means this aim is to be achieved. 

As the result of our geographical situa- 
tion, it will always remain our task to 
form a just estimate of the opposing de- 
mands of world-economics and national 
economics in the narrower sense, and of 
oversea and continental politics. Even 
in land-warfare, economic considerations 
have played a very considerable part. 
The occupation by our troops of Belgium 
and of the coal and industrial district of 
Northern France, as well as of Poland, 
Lithuania, and Kurland, procured us im- 
portant economic advantages and in- 
volved a corresponding loss to our enemies. 
The main object of the Serbian campaign 



THE WORLD WAR 13 

was to establish a land communication 
with Turkey, whose obstinate defence of 
the Dardanelles had rendered us signal 
service, since it barred the exit from and 
entry to the harbours of the Black Sea 
against Russia. At the same time, the 
operations against Serbia procured us the 
valuable alliance of Bulgaria. Not only 
did we acquire by this means an acces- 
sion of strength against the numerical 
superiority of our enemies, but also the 
possibility of trade intercourse with the 
Balkan States. A year later, the un- 
welcome hostility of Roumania and her 
overthrow procured us further economic 
advantages and secured our position in re- 
gard to the whole of the Balkans. Now, 
as always, it is the sword which decides 
in war; it is victory on the battle-field that 
gives the decision, but its effect is far more 
dependent than it used to be on world- 
economic factors. These factors are to 
be traced through the whole of this War. 



14 DEDUCTIONS FROM 

To be sure, modern times had already 
witnessed one great economic war. The 
American Civil War of the sixties of last 
century arose out of the economic antago- 
nism between the trading and industrial 
States of the North and the cotton-grow- 
ing States of the South of the Union. 
In the latter, cultivation by the aid of 
slaves formed the basis of the industry, 
and to this extent the slave question was 
a factor in the dispute. It was not, how- 
ever, until later that the demand for the 
abolition of slavery found wide expression 
in the North and was utilised as a wel- 
come means of stirring up feeling against 
the South. The real points at issue were 
that the Northern States wanted high 
protective duties, while the Southern 
States wanted to facilitate export, and 
that the Northern States had a special 
interest in utilising the customs revenues 
for investments which should above all 
be of advantage to their trade, but which 



THE JVORLD WAR 15 

were a matter of indiflference to the South. 
The American War of Secession, like 
everything else American at that time, 
attracted little attention with us. Ger- 
many was still only a geographical con- 
ception; there could be no question of a 
world-policy for its component States. 
Moreover, our own wars of 1864, 1866, 
and 1870-71, claimed all our attention. 
Yet, different as were the cause, the de- 
velopment, and the other conditions of 
the American Civil War compared with 
the present World War, the economic 
factors which in each case found ex- 
pression have engendered more than 
one similar phenomenon. The Northern 
States endeavoured at the outset, by the 
aid of their imposing fleet, to cut off the 
Southern States, which had no battle- 
fleet worth mentioning, from their sea- 
borne supplies, and, also, on land, from 
the Mississippi and the corn-growing 
States of the South-West, and thus pa- 



i6 DEDUCTIONS FROM 

ralyse them economically. The valour 
of the Southern troops, who were far 
inferior numerically, as well as of their 
generals, and, above all, the distinguished 
leadership of Lee, for four years rendered 
impossible the accomplishment of this 
so-called "Anaconda plan," until the 
Southern States finally succumbed to 
the blockade. 

Things never quite repeat themselves 
in history. But we may learn from his- 
tory. Not in order to be more prudent 
another time, but in order to be wise for 
all time, as Jacob Burckhardt says. In 
this sense, the American Civil War might 
have furnished us many a hint which 
was left disregarded. But we must con- 
fess, as Professor Bernhard Harms said 
in a lecture, that in August, 1914, we 
found ourselves confronted with the prob- 
lem of conducting a war governed by 
world-economic considerations without 
immediately comprehending it. To be 



THE IVORLD IVAR 17 

sure, our opponents too only gradually 
perceived the true situation. The opera- 
tions which they had begun extracted only 
little by little the full advantage of the 
world-economic situation, which was 
favourable to them and unfavourable to 
us ; they did so only when they met with 
an unexpected force of resistance in the 
Central Powers. But in any case, in 
our military conduct of the War, we drew 
the necessary conclusions from the world- 
situation, and were at pains to turn it 
to account by means of a far-reaching 
organisation. 

In every domain only the War itself 
could be the great teacher in regard to 
these hitherto unknown effects of world- 
economics upon its range. It was gene- 
rally taken for granted that a long war 
was in these days hardly practicable. 
For England it was "a commercial war 
with a view to her own enrichment 
and the annihilation of her chief 



i8 DEDUCTIONS FROM 

rival."^ Nevertheless, even England did 
not at the outset reckon for a war of such 
long duration. Only when it became ap- 
parent that the forcible annihilation of 
her "chief rival" by the aid of her Allies 
was not to be accomplished did England 
find herself compelled to make consider- 
able additions to her fighting forces, and 
finally to adopt the system of universal 
service. Lord Kitchener was prompt in 
grasping the situation, and, by erecting a 
strong army, put the country in a position 
to sustain a long war. 

Even Field-Marshal Count Schlieffen, 
for all his farsightedness, though he in- 
sisted that the frontal attack would pro- 
duce no decisive result, but that the 
campaign would drag itself out, declared 
in the article already referred to: 

"Such wars are, however, impossible 
at a time when the existence of the nation 

' Dr. Georg Solmssen. England und Wir ! Lecture 
delivered at Cologne, November 13, 1916. 



THE WORLD WAR 19 

is based upon the unbroken continuance 
of trade and industry, and the machinery 
which has been brought to a standstill 
must be set in motion again by a speedy 
decision. A strategy of exhaustion be- 
comes impossible, when the maintenance 
of it demands milliards from millions." 
This frontal wearing down of forces in 
entrenched warfare has none the less 
taken place on most sections of the fronts; 
but we have reaped positive results only 
from the war of movement. The present- 
day world has, contrary to expectation, 
proved itself capable of enduring a long 
war, though at the cost of such destruc- 
tion as humanity has never before ex- 
perienced. The expenditure of milliards 
would to be sure have been avoided, if 
we had succeeded, as Count Schlieffen in 
the same argument goes on to suggest, 
in conducting the attack on a large scale 
against the front and both flanks of the 
enemy, and in developing it to a sweeping 



20 DEDUCTIONS FROM THE fVAR 

victory. We did, in fact, achieve several 
local victories of this nature, but we did 
not achieve such a victory at the Marne 
with our whole western army at the 
beginning of the War. It is fruitless to 
picture to oneself how, if the case had 
been otherwise, events might have de- 
veloped in detail, but we may confidently 
assert that a complete German victory 
at the Marne in September, 1914, would 
have given quite another character to 
the whole War, and would certainly have 
shortened it very considerably. From 
this may be seen the full significance of 
a decisive military success, even in a war 
so influenced by world-economics as the 
present. 



II 

THE PSYCHOLOGY OF NATIONAL AND 
MASSED WARFARE 

In the course of the present World 
War the soul of a war waged by means of 
great national armies has revealed itself 
as something special, something hitherto 
inexperienced. Its orgin may be traced 
back to the time of the French Revolu- 
tion. The levee en masse of the French 
Republic is, to be sure, to a great extent 
legendary. It furnished hardly a quarter 
of the anticipated man-power. Clause- 
witz'^ remarks justly: 

"If the whole War of the Revolution 
passed over without all this making itself 
felt in its full force and becoming quite 

' General Carl v. Clausewitz. On War, vol. iii., p. loi. 
Kegan Paul, Trench, Tnibner, Ltd., London. [Vom 
Kriege. Skizzen zum VIII. Buck, 3 Kap. B.] 
21 



22 DEDUCTIONS FROM 

evident; if the generals of the Revolu- 
tion did not persistently press on to the 
final extreme, and did not overthrow the 
monarchies in Europe; if the German 
armies now and again had the opportun- 
ity of resisting with success and checking 
for a time the torrent of victory — the 
cause lay in reality in that technical 
incompleteness with which the French 
had to contend, which showed itself first 
among the common soldiers, then in the 
generals, lastly, at the time of the Direc- 
tory, in the Government itself. After 
all this was perfected by the hand of 
Buonaparte, this military power, based 
on the strength of the whole nation, 
marched over Europe, smashing every- 
thing in pieces so surely and certainly 
that wherever it encountered only the 
old-fashioned armies, the result was not 
doubtful for a moment/' 

Yet Napoleon waged his victorious 
wars with a praetorian army. Only at 



THE WORLD WAR 23 

the period of his decline did he utiHse 
the national strength to a fuller extent. 
After the overthrow of his army in Russia, 
he made what were for those days enor- 
mous levies in France, amounting in all 
to 1,237,000 men. Even at the time 
when his power was increasing, it was 
not so much the strength of the armies 
which he placed in the field that decided 
the issue as the fact that the other States 
were not at that time in a position to 
make good their losses by a continual 
requisitioning of the national strength. 

The French people did not by any 
means flock enthusiastically to the Im- 
perial flag. After the repulse of the inva- 
sion of 1792, their warlike ardour had 
been more and more extinguished. In 
the case of the increased levies of the 
last year of the First Empire, it was 
necessary to resort to violent measures 
in order to carry out the conscription. 
Hence, though the Napoleonic army was 



24 DEDUCTIONS FROM 

supported upon the national strength, 
it was never a national army in the true 
sense of the term. 

On the other hand, the designation 
"national army" exactly applies to the 
Prussian army of the War of Liberation. 
The population of the diminished and 
impoverished Prussian State at that time 
numbered less than five millions, and of 
this number the Prussian army included 
in August, 1813, not less than 27i,(X)0 
men. Moreover, the recourse to the 
provinces for the organisation of the 
Landwehr gave the army a special char- 
acter. By the retention of universal 
military service even after the war, the 
Prussian army was differentiated from 
the armies of other States. In Prussia 
alone, after the great campaigns of the 
beginning of the nineteenth century, did 
a genuine fusion take place between na- 
tion and army. But even in 1870-71 
ti'ie strain upon our national strength for 



THE WORLD IVAR 25 

the purposes of war was nothing like as 
great as in the present World War. We 
entered upon the Franco-Prussian War 
with the advantage on our side, and there- 
fore it appeared to many unnecessary to 
requisition the national strength more 
extensively than had been done hitherto. 
Only reluctantly did Roon accede to 
Moltke's demand on December 8, 1870, for 
further supplies of troops, which were ren- 
dered necessary by the growing extension 
of the theatre of war and by the mass- 
levies of the Republic in the second period 
of the war; and yet how niodest appears 
this demand compared with the condi- 
tions of the present day. It amounted 
only to the calling up of fifty-seven Land- 
wehr battalions which were employed at 
home for guarding prisoners or for coast 
defence, and the transfer to Alsace-Lor- 
raine of a number of reserve battalions. 
This proposal, emanating from the Chief 
of the General Staff, was to be sure the 



26 DEDUCTIONS FROM 

result of the increasing difficulties which 
the national war in France was causing, 
but although even at that time nation 
was contending against nation on French 
soil, yet the armies of the Republic con- 
sisted only of masses of men hurriedly 
scrambled together, who were again and 
again routed by the onset of the German 
troops, which, though far inferior in 
numbers, were vastly superior in fighting 
efficiency. Thus even the 950,000 men 
whom France still had under arms at 
the conclusion of the war could not alter 
the fate of the country. 

"Gambetta believed," writes Arthur 
Chuquet,' "that the legendary marvels 
of 1792 and 1793 could be repeated. He 
overlooked the fact that it was the cow- 
ardice and lack of discipline of the volun- 
teer forces of the First Republic which 
were mainly responsible for the defeat 
of the revolutionary armies, and that the 

^ La Guerre 1870-1871. Paris, 1895. 



THE WORLD WAR 27 

Republic at that time was saved, not by 
the heroism of its troops, but by dissen- 
sion within the coahtion." 

The campaign against the army of 
the Second Empire had demonstrated 
the superiority of our own army based 
upon the principle of universal military 
service. The campaign against the Re- 
public revealed the hopelessness of the 
resistance of a completely improvised 
miHtia to disciplined troops. Never- 
theless, no really new points of view in 
the realm of war psychology were re- 
vealed in this instance. Quite otherwise 
was it in the case of the American Civil 
War. Here the Southern States were 
very soon compelled to resort to univer- 
sal mihtary service, and the Northern 
States to raise larger and larger volun- 
teer levies, with a longer term of service. 
Like every other civil war, this was 
steeped in the hatred of both parties. 
In the Southern States the reaction of 



28 DEDUCTIONS FROM 

the national character upon military 
efficiency was revealed very clearly. 
They continued their resistance to the 
utmost limit. But Europe, up to the 
outbreak of the World War, had not wit- 
nessed any such phenomena in war. It 
was the adoption of universal military 
service by all the Great Powers, as a 
result of the German victories of 1870-71, 
which first introduced a new element in- 
to the conduct of war. This inevitably 
made itself all the more perceptible when 
the increased facilities of communication 
of modern times rendered the nations 
more closely coherent within their own 
borders and more accessible to the sug- 
gestive influence of the Press for good as 
well as for ill. That men have always 
been susceptible to suggestion is demon- 
strated by the spread of religious fana- 
ticism, but the present age has increased 
this susceptibility still further. Even 
distinguished minds are subject to mass- 



THE WORLD WAR 29 

suggestion, as is shown in the case of 
numerous distinguished scholars and 
artists among our enemies. Neither 
judgment nor good taste availed to pre- 
vent them from joining in the general 
orgies of hatred directed against every- 
thing German. 

Among the factors which have contri- 
buted in recent times to increase this 
susceptibility of the masses must be 
counted the political elections, which have 
everywhere stirred up passions and pre- 
judiced sound judgment. They alone 
explain many events which have taken 
place in America. In the several States 
there are over twenty offices which have 
to be filled annually by means of public 
elections. And in these it is not the 
personal opinion of the voter that counts, 
but the party politicians and their whips. 
It is the ingenuity and unscrupulousness 
of the latter, as well as their expenditure 
of large sums of money, that decide the 



30 DEDUCTIONS FROM 

issue. It is, in fact, in the great demo- 
cratic republics that we find the worst 
form of moral servitude. The widely- 
diffused but superficial education of the 
masses renders them peculiarly open to 
suggestion. The sense of unity of whole 
nations has been considerably enhanced 
by the fact that in present-day warfare 
the entire population is involved either 
directly or indirectly. The countries as 
a whole are implicated economically. 

In 19 14 for the first time France op- 
posed to our national army an army 
organised upon the basis of universal 
military service; an army, moreover, in 
which hatred against everything German 
had been kindled by the assiduous foster- 
ing through decades of the agitation for 
a war of revanche. The overwhelming 
impression of our initial successes, which 
had by no means been anticipated when 
Germany was attacked on all sides, in- 
flamed these passions still further. The 



THE IVORLD WAR 31 

Swiss writer Stegemann, in his history 
of this War,^ suggests that it may have 
been suspected in foreign countries that 
the preparedness of Germany's army and 
navy, which had been achieved during 
long years by infinite labour and feverish 
activity, was merely apparent and was 
associated with a degeneration of nervous 
force. 

**To this suspicion the campaigns of 
this War have furnished a heroic answer. 
When the order of mobilisation was 
published, all trace of nervousness van- 
ished. Even from a distance one could 
perceive the power and energy of a 
military organisation which was suddenly 
called from its tranquil development to 
perform the most exalted achievements. 
This gave nourishment to the theory 
that Germany had intentionally provoked 
the War. The thoroughness in execution 
which was really due to the character 

* Vol. i., p. 100. 



32 DEDUCTIONS FROM 

and constitution of the nation was mis- 
construed as the deliberate provocation 
of war.'* 

As a result of the thoughtless adoption 
of franc-tireur methods of warfare in 
Belgium, with the support and approval 
of the authorities, the War acquired from 
the outset still more of the character of 
a struggle of nation against nation. 
The principle that war is directed only 
against the armed strength of the enemy- 
State and not against its population 
could not under these circumstances be 
upheld by our troops. They found them- 
selves compelled to resort to severe 
measures of retaliation. Thus the War 
acquired a character of brutality which 
is otherwise very alien to the nature of 
our well-conducted German soldiers. 

The self-assurance of the French army, 
which had already begun to waver, was 
restored after the Battle of the Marne. 
Subsequently the French authorities left 



THE IVORLD WAR 33 

no stone unturned in order, with the aid of 
a corrupt and lying Press, to sustain the 
confidence of the nation in an ultimate 
victory. The continued augmentation 
of the allied English army, the alleged 
inexhaustible reserves of Russia (in 
spite of all the defeats which she had 
suffered), the entry into the War of Italy, 
and, later, of Roumania as Allies, the 
munitions furnished by America, and 
finally her open partnership against us — 
all this had to be utilised again and again 
to strengthen the tissue of lies which 
France wove round herself more and more 
closely, so closely that the French finally 
lost all sense of truth. Thus the French 
army is inspired, even if not consciously 
so in all its members, with the feeling 
that it is not only a question of freeing 
the native soil from a hated invader, 
but also of a struggle for the future world- 
position of France. The characteristics 
of the French soldier have always been a 



34 DEDUCTIONS FROM 

product rather of his race than of any 
military training. They explain the de- 
votion and the contempt of death with 
which whole divisions have hurled them- 
selves forward again and again in dense 
masses in hopeless attempts to break 
through. 

The French national character exhibits 
striking contradictions. High and noble 
qualities exist side by side with base im- 
pulses. The French soldier exhibits 
heroic courage side by side with the 
instincts of a " Nettoyeur^*^ and, in the 
treatment of our prisoners, his conduct 
has been worthy of an apache. The 
French officers have completely lost that 
chivalrous sentiment which as late as 
1870 found expression in the words of 
an old Frenchman: **The person of a 
prisoner is sacred." The French, both 
white and black, and their women no 
less, have not scrupled to jeer at and ill- 
treat our prisoners in the most flagrant 



THE IVORLD WAR 35 

manner, and the Government of the 
Republic has in general furnished an 
example of unworthy treatment of pris- 
oners. The naturally amiable and, un- 
der ordinary circumstances, good-natured 
Frenchman easily degenerates, as a result 
of his excitable temperament, into the 
very opposite. The history of the wars 
of religion and of the Revolution affords 
evidence of the fact. The human beast 
is always roused in him with surprising 
suddenness. His characteristic light- 
heartedness engenders in him a dis- 
inclination to think things out to a 
conclusion. This renders him very suscep- 
tible to influence, and prevents him from 
seeing through the tissue of lies pre- 
sented to him in the newspapers. While 
the Frenchman had always displayed 
military aptitude, his training in time of 
peace upon the basis of universal military 
service had only still further developed 
his good military qualities, and he has 



36 DEDUCTIONS FROM 

never exhibited those failings which for- 
merly and often erroneously have been 
attributed to French armies, such as lack 
of endurance in difficult situations, the 
inability to endure defeats, susceptibility 
to panic. The effect of universal mili- 
tary service has manifestly been to disci- 
pline the whole nation, and to furnish an 
appropriate vessel for its always very 
strongly developed sense of unity. Those 
who judged the French nation by the cus- 
tomary standard of former days have been 
astonished at their conduct in this War. 
As England has developed into a Land 
Power only in the course of this War, it 
has been only by degrees that warlike 
enthusiasm has infected the masses of 
her people. England, great as have been 
her feats of organisation, has never been 
able to make up for the advantage with 
which France entered the War owing to 
her possession of universal military ser- 
vice. Since she took her time, and the 



THE WORLD WAR 37 

nature of entrenched warfare made it 
possible, England was able, however, to 
furnish her numerous new formations 
with a training which was lacking in the 
armies of Gambetta. Nevertheless, the 
new English divisions could not attain 
either the coherence of the old troops of 
the expeditionary army first dispatched 
to France or the fighting value of the 
French troops. The English reached a 
high degree of technical efficiency, but 
their fighting tactics remained defective. 
Also, for all that tough courage peculiar 
to the Englishman, they lacked that 
spirit which can be engendered only by 
the consciousness of a lofty national 
purpose such as that for which the French 
were fighting. In place of her voluntary 
army England gradually built up for 
herself on French soil a national army; 
but, voluntary army or national army, 
it served only the ends of English politics 
and the economic war against Germany. 



38 DEDUCTIONS FROM 

If the purpose of the War played only a 
minor part in the case of the voluntary 
army, it played a very considerable part 
in the case of the national army. If this 
purpose was not presented clearly and 
comprehensively to the understanding of 
every individual, the maximum amount 
of effort could not be expected from this 
army. In stirring up and working upon 
the feelings of the masses, England in fact 
showed no more scruples than France. 
Though the Englishman is less excitable 
by temperament, he is all the more ob- 
stinate in clinging to a notion which has 
once taken root in his mind. This stir- 
ring up of hatred has in his case, too, en- 
gendered distressing excesses as regards 
the treatment of German prisoners. In 
certain cases, even if not as a general rule, 
the English have shown themselves not 
behind the French in brutality. 

Thus we had to wage war against ene- 
mies who were under the influence of a 



THE WORLD WAR 39 

mass-psychosis. This has engendered 
phenomena such as Europe had not wit- 
nessed since the time of the wars of re- 
ligion. Deeds of horror and senseless 
rage of destruction, such as are described 
for us in Simplicissimus, have again 
made themselves manifest. The notion 
that humanity as a whole had advanced 
spiritually was proved to be an error. 
The vast distance between civilisation 
and Kultur was clearly revealed. 

After the Thirty Years' War an effort 
was made to alleviate, by careful train- 
ing of the men, the horrors of war due to 
the outrages of the military rabble. Thus 
it was asserted in praise of Prince Eugene 
of Savoy that in the neighbourhood of 
his camp the peasant could till his field 
unmolested. Instead of war being made 
to feed itself, a complicated system of 
supplies was adopted. The result was 
that the war strategy of the weak volun- 
tary armies of that time became fixed 



40 DEDUCTIONS FROM 

more and more into a conventional mould, 
from which Frederick the Great was 
the first to emancipate it, so far as the 
limited means available at that time 
rendered this possible. Subsequently, 
under Napoleon, war developed more and 
more into "true war," to use Fichte's 
expression. This transformation, how- 
ever, could be fully effected only by means 
of universal military service. Universal 
military service holds sway over our age 
and for generations will not vanish. To 
it Prussia-Germany owes her advance- 
ment, and it was inevitable that, when all 
the Great Powers adopted it, the violence 
of war should again be augmented. We 
must not let the bright side of universal 
service blind us to its dark side. Hence- 
forth the passion of war infected whole 
nations, and this passion was constantly 
inflamed anew by contact with that of the 
enemy. Therewith many of those bar- 
riers were overthrown by means of which 



THE JVORLD WAR 41 

the professional soldiery, preserving the 
chivalrous customs of the Middle Ages, 
had sought to check the excesses of war. 
Also the barriers which International Law 
had sought to oppose to the encroach- 
ments of war collapsed in the face of this 
new violence. 

At the same time factors were intro- 
duced into the World War which could 
not fail to react upon the strategical and 
tactical conditions and which it will be 
impossible to disregard in the future. 
They call for a new standard in measuring 
the efficiency of armies. Thus the efficiency 
of the German troops far surpasses that 
which might have been expected ac- 
cording to the standard of earlier times. 
Even in regard to the operations at the 
Loire at the turn of the year 1870-71, 
the late Field-Marshal Freiherr von 
der Goltz wrote in his Reminiscences^: 

' Die Operationen der 2. Armee an der Loire. Berlin, 
1875. E. S. Mittler und Sohn. 



42 DEDUCTIONS FROM 

"With the exception of a few stout 
hearts, everyone was sick of even the 
most successful battles. The fire of war 
still burnt, but with a dim and flickering 
light. The craving to enjoy at length 
the longed-for term of tranquillity was 
very widespread." 

In these words is reflected the effect 
of an exhausting triumphal progress which 
the second army had pushed into the 
heart of the enemy country. Here, in 
fact, the thought might well intrude: 
Have we not now had victory enough.? 
And yet at that time less than five 
months of war had elapsed, and the course 
of the war had been extraordinarily 
successful. The troops had not under- 
gone anything like such tremendous expe- 
riences as they have had in the present 
World War. In this War the conscious- 
ness that our national existence is at stake 
has raised us above ourselves. 

All of us, leaders as well as men, have 



THE WORLD WAR 43 

human weaknesses, and assuredly not all 
German soldiers are heroes by nature. 
But it is precisely in this — in the fact 
that the weak are carried along with the 
strong — that the educative force of this 
struggle for the existence of Germany is 
revealed. The weak could not do other- 
wise than strive to be heroes. Reverses, 
such as were occasionally inevitable in 
this long and tremendous War, have 
doubtless had a temporarily depressing 
effect upon the troops, and after efforts 
and a consumption of nervous force such 
as have never been experienced in any 
previous wars, the craving for rest has 
sometimes made itself felt. But even 
in the third year of the War, the fire of 
war did not merely flicker with a dim 
light, but was constantly rekindled to 
fresh flame. In Transylvania and Rou- 
mania and in Eastern GaHcia in 1917 the 
troops displayed an ardour equal to that 
of the first days of the War. The magic 



44 DEDUCTIONS FROM 

of victory enabled them to defy all the 
difficulties of the ground and all the in- 
clemencies of the weather. They would 
not, of course, have been a national army, 
linked to the homeland by a thousand ties, 
if they had felt no desire for the conclusion 
of a long war, a war demanding ever fresh 
sacrifices, and if a calmer feeling had not 
taken the place of the enthusiasm of the 
first months. But it was just such a 
feeling that was necessary for the accom- 
plishment of such gigantic achievements 
in the West and in the East. What was 
wanted was not enthusiasm, but the 
living heroic sense of duty on the German 
soldier. Moreover, there exists in our 
army a cool contempt for danger, such 
as elsewhere has only been exhibited in 
picked professional armies, and yet ours 
has remained a national army in the best 
sense of the word. 
Clausewitz declares^: 

' On War, vol. i., p. 47. [Vom Kriege. I. B., 3 Kap.] 



THE WORLD IVAR 45 

"If we look at a wild warlike race, then 
we find a warlike spirit in individuals 
much more common than in a civilised 
people; for in the former almost every 
warrior possesses it, whilst in the civil- 
ised, whole masses are only carried away 
by it from necessity, never by inclin- 
ation." 

None the less, the inculcated sense of 
duty, the conscious will of the whole 
people, when, as in the case of this War, 
it is a question of safeguarding our most 
treasured possessions, and when the pur- 
pose of the War is clearly manifest, has 
brought forth even loftier achievements 
than mere warlike impulse, or, as in the 
case of the Japanese, the sense of the 
blessedness of extinction. 

In fact, we cannot sufficiently express 
our joyful recognition of the high sense 
of duty and the power of resistance which 
our troops have everywhere displayed 
in the face of overwhelmingly superior 



46 ■ DEDUCTIONS FROM 

forces, while at the same time we ought 
not to refuse our respect even for our 
enemies, above all the French. For they 
too were prepared and resolved every one 
to die for his country. On both sides 
was revealed a nervous force, a capacity 
of resistance to inclement conditions, with 
which no one had credited the civilised 
humanity of the present day, more espe- 
cially in the face of the increased effective- 
ness of present-day weapons. Before 
the War it was looked upon as an under- 
stood thing that the efficiency of the 
older classes of recruits was only limited. 
Field-Marshal Count Schlieffen, who 
taught us how to manipulate a massed 
army, and who, because he was convinced 
of the great importance of numbers in 
war, was unwilling to abandon the em- 
ployment of the older drafts in the front 
line: none the less declared, '*Landwehr 
and Landsturm, territorial army and 
territorial army reserves, can only to a 



THE WORLD JVAR 47 

very limited extent be reckoned as part 
of the nation in arms.*' 

If the World War has not confirmed 
this prediction, It is due to the fact that 
such imponderable things defy any at- 
tempt to assess them. Hence It Is not 
to be wondered at that we encountered 
surprises in these matters. The improved 
hygiene and treatment of wounds of the 
present day have contributed greatly to 
maintaining the efficiency of the national 
armies. In the case of Germany, above 
all, medical art and science have achieved 
wonders. They have succeeded In pre- 
serving our army from those epidemics 
which have been the scourge of previous 
armies and In restoring to It almost 90 
per cent, of Its wounded. Only by their 
aid has it been possible to maintain con- 
tinuously the full strength of our troops 
and to carry on the war for so long. 

The Russians have afforded us less 
cause for surprise than the rest of our 



48 DEDUCTIONS FROM 

enemies. True they brought up their 
masses earlier than had been anticipated, 
but these, as was to be expected, proved 
themselves very unwieldy, so that the 
superior mobility of our troops helped to 
restore the balance. Their unshaken re- 
sistance to the Russian mass attacks did 
the rest. 

With the introduction of universal 
military service in the year 1874, the 
Russian army had acquired quite a 
new character. In place of the old sol- 
diers with their long term of service, whose 
regiment had been their home, there were 
now levies of troops subject first to a six- 
year and later to a four-year and three- 
year term of service. Many conditions 
which had formerly contributed to the 
efficiency of the Russian troops were now 
abolished. The subordination of the 
peasants disappeared more and more, 
but it could not be replaced by that con- 
scious and enlightened sense of duty 



THE IVORLD WAR 49 

which is possible only in an old civilised 
nation. If the Russian army was found 
wanting in Eastern Asia, this was due 
above all to the fact that it proved in- 
capable of adapting itself to the con- 
ditions of modern warfare. It afforded 
no opportunity for the training of the 
individual soldier to self- reliance in 
war. In his report to the Tsar upon 
the Manchurian campaign Kuropatkin 
said: 

*' Undoubtedly, universal military ser- 
vice has, from a moral standpoint, im- 
proved the mass of our troops, but in 
view of the low standard of civilisation 
of the individual men, it is difficult to 
infuse them with the notion of discipline. 
Belief in God, devotion to the Tsar, love 
for the Fatherland, still contribute to 
keep the soldiers firm in the ranks, and 
to make them brave and obedient 
fighters, but these feelings have in 
recent times been severely shaken and 



50 DEDUCTIONS FROM 

forcibly wrested from the heart of the 
Russian.'* 

The unpopularity of the war against 
Japan was, in the opinion of the General, 
chiefly to blame for the often very de- 
fective resistance of the troops in battle. 
He writes: 

"To-day more than ever, the moral 
strength of an army is governed by public 
feeling. Therefore, in order to be suc- 
cessful, a war must be popular, the whole 
people must strive for success in harmony 
with the Government. But the aims 
which we pursued in the Far East were 
understood neither by the Russian sol- 
diers nor their officers." 

In 1914, on the other hand, this con- 
dition was completely satisfied: at the 
beginning, the war was extremely popular 
in Russia. Moreover, the Russian army 
had learnt much from the Manchurian 
campaign, both as regards organisation 
and also as regards strategy and tactics. 



THE WORLD WAR 51 

It had been systematically organised and 
prepared for the war against Germany 
and Austria- Hungary. Nevertheless, 
the defects in the political organism 
of the Empire and in the national 
character could not be remedied in a 
decade. Kuropatkin expressed his con- 
viction that, in a war against Germany 
and Austria-Hungary, Russia would 
certainly in the first instance be defeated. 
Only with time did he hope for a turn of 
the tide, thanks to the inexhaustibleness 
of Russia's reserves of men. His respect 
for the superiority of German training 
led Kuropatkin, when he was Minister 
of War, to declare that a war of conquest 
against Germany would be a calamity for 
the Russian Empire. The World War, 
no less than the March revolution of the 
present year, though in a different sense, 
has revealed that Russia was not really 
ripe for universal military service. Had 
it been otherwise, we and our allies might 



52 DEDUCTIONS FROM 

have been unable to defend ourselves 
against envelopment by overwhelmingly 
superior numbers. 

More than once did the Austro-Hun- 
garian army threaten to succumb before 
the far superior numbers of the Russian 
forces. At the beginning, the Austro- 
Hungarian army proved not strong 
enough to defeat the main body of the 
Russian forces in Galicia. Certainly the 
troops showed no lack of heroic self- 
sacrifice, and the engagements of August 
and September, 19 14, furnished signal 
instances of the splendid courage of the 
army of the Dual Monarchy, which was 
in fact filled with glowing enthusiasm 
for this contest of giants. Naturally, 
in view of the mixture of races comprised 
in the Dual Monarchy, it could not be 
kindled through and through with a 
common ardour to the same degree as 
the German army. Such a unity of 
sentiment as existed with us was impos- 



THE WORLD WAR 53 

sible in its case. The AustroHungarian 
military leaders had to cope with difficul- 
ties arising from the mixture of races 
comprised in their forces, difficulties 
which did not exist in the case of our- 
selves or our opponents. Moreover, 
these brave troops had to suffer for the 
sins and omissions of which the Parlia- 
ments of the Monarchy had been guilty 
during past decades. The army was too 
weak in numbers, and equipped with far 
too insufficient an artillery, to enable it 
to resist successfully the Russian hordes 
and at the same time to cope with the 
Serbians. The weakness of their regi- 
mental cadres in time of peace had ren- 
dered impossible the training for actual 
battle-tactics. This fact was bound to 
result in a certain lack of unity and co- 
hesion in the larger units. 

If the Russians, in spite of their great 
numerical superiority, did not succeed 
in smashing the brave Austro-Hungarian 



54 DEDUCTIONS FROM 

army in the autumn of 19 14 at Lemberg 
and on the San, that speaks for the small 
ability and defective mobility of the Rus- 
sian army, which, it is true, made pro- 
gress in these respects in the course of 
the War. As a result of the reckless 
expenditure of the Russian troops, whose 
leaders were always spendthrift of the 
lives of their men, their army remained, 
notwithstanding their heavy losses and 
the defective training of the reserves, a 
redoubtable adversary. 

In spite of all the technical improve- 
ments of the present day, the moral ele- 
ment proved to be, now as ever, the 
decisive factor in war. In the case of 
the Central Powers, that lofty moral 
strength, arising from the sense of right- 
eous self-defence in a war which had 
been thrust upon them, showed its su- 
periority to the zeal which a commercial 
and predatory war could kindle in our 
enemies. The following words of Droy- 



THE WORLD WAR 55 

sen' completely apply to the German 
nation: 

" Certainly it is not the fortune of war 
which decides the question of right and 
wrong between States, but to succumb 
in the struggle for existence is evidence of 
disorders or weakness such as history 
does not forgive. Wealth and size and 
abundance of material resources are not 
sufficient. There are other and ethical 
factors which ensure and achieve victory: 
a deeply inculcated docility, an order 
and subordination such as give shape to 
the mass, a discipline such as renders it 
fit for use and self-confident even under 
failure, an emulation of all the noble 
passions such as steels and braces the 
soul, together with a strong will to direct 
the whole, and power of thought to point 
the way to the desired goal." 

' Preussische Politik, V. 



Ill 

THE INFLUENCE OF TECHNICAL SCIENCE 

Notwithstanding the decisive im- 
portance of the moral factor, we must not 
fail to appreciate the great significance of 
technical science in the present War as 
regards the effectiveness of weapons, pro- 
tection against these weapons, organisa- 
tion of transport and intelligence services, 
and also aerial warfare. It could not 
reveal itself fully until this War. In 
peace we had rather suspected than 
actually realised it, for any testing of it 
on a large scale, let alone on such an 
enormous scale as the World War has 
witnessed, was out of the question. The 
Russo-Japanese War did not reveal it 
to anything like the same extent; hence 

the instruction which that war furnished 
56 



DEDUCTIONS FROM THE WAR 57 

could give but a feeble conception of 
what might be expected in the sphere 
of technical science. Moreover, in the 
decade following upon the Manchurlan 
campaign, technical science underwent 
an increasingly rapid development. 

The importance of railways as an 
instrument of war was early recognised 
by Moltke. He always kept an eye on 
their development. Up to the beginning 
of the World War, the mobilisation of 
the German forces by rail in 1870 was 
looked upon as a phenomenal achieve- 
ment, and rightly so, when we consider 
the very meagre development of our 
railway system at that date. Never- 
theless, at that time less than half a 
million Germans had to be dispatched 
to the frontier, as compared with some- 
thing like one-and-a-half millions in the 
year 19 14. Also the transports within 
the Empire after the mobilisation were 
more than three times as numerous as 



58 DEDUCTIONS FROM 

those of 1870. Moreover, the transfers of 
troops during the operations themselves, 
which in 1870-71 took place on both 
sides in France, appear insignificant by 
the side of those effected during the World 
War. In the separate theatres of war 
movements of transports have been con- 
stantly effected, and at the same time 
the railways have been utilised for man- 
oeuvring purposes. The one-time notion 
which attributed a certain rigidity to 
railways as compared with progress on 
foot, because the latter could be deflected 
at a moment's notice in any desired 
direction, has now lost much of its force. 
In spite of the rigidity of the railway 
tracks, we have always contrived to 
dispatch the transports in accordance 
with the requirements of the military 
command. Whole armies have been 
transferred from one theatre of war to 
another, as was essential for the Central 
Powers in a war conducted on several 



THE WORLD WAR 59 

fronts. Previous wars have, of course, 
from time to time, furnished instances of 
a similar utilisation of railways, for 
instance the American Civil War, and 
the War of 1866, in which strong con- 
tingents of the Austrian Southern Army- 
were dispatched over the Alps to the 
Danube and back again to the north of 
Italy. When in 1866, after Koniggratz, 
we were threatened with the interven- 
tion of France, Moltke contemplated the 
transport of the Prussian troops in Mo- 
ravia to the Rhine. Nevertheless, as re- 
gards the distances to be traversed and 
the mass of men and materials to be 
conveyed, never until the present War 
have such demands been made on the 
railways. 

The enormous numbers engaged in the 
War involved a very high degree of de- 
pendence on the railways. Even in 1870- 
71 the German second army (which at 
that time comprised only three army 



60 DEDUCTIONS FROM 

corps) experienced at the Loire the serious 
inconvenience of not having adequate 
railway communications in their rear. 
At the present day, the unhampered 
development of operations in the war 
of movement and a secure maintenance 
of positions in entrenched warfare are 
only possible if the bringing up of muni- 
tions, stores, and men, and the removal 
of the wounded, as well as the systematic 
organisation of the whole sanitary ser- 
vice, are ensured by means of the rail- 
ways. Only from time to time has it 
been possible to dispense with them by 
having recourse to motor wagons; but 
the latter have never really furnished 
an adequate substitute for railways. 

Moreover, the notion that railways were 
not to be relied on as an instrument of 
war, because they could be so easily 
destroyed, has proved itself untenable. 
This was entirely applicable in the case 
of the destruction of railways in 1870, 



THE IVORLD IVAR 6i 

but present-day technology has always 
found means to remove such difficulties 
with comparative speed and to make the 
lines serviceable again. Where special 
difficulties presented themselves, as for 
instance in Macedonia in the late autumn 
of 19 1 5, operations have been unavoid- 
ably brought to a standstill. 

In his history of the autumn campaign 
of 1813/ Lieutenant-General Friederich 
attributes the overthrow of Napoleon 
principally to the fact that the manipu- 
lation and the mutual reinforcem.ent at 
the right moment of the various divisions 
in Saxony, Silesia, and the Mark, on the 
Lower Elbe and in Bavaria, of a French 
army numbering in all more than half 
a million men could only be possible 
with the aid of railways and the electric 
telegraph. The armies of that day had 
already outgrown the technical resources 
of their age. If we consider that, after 

' Vol. iii., p. 401. E. S. Mittler und Sohn. 



62 DEDUCTIONS FROM 

Napoleon himself had returned to Dres- 
den from the pursuit of the main army 
of the allies which began on the 28th of 
August, it was not until the 3d of Septem- 
ber that he was fully informed of the 
defeats of Oudinot at Gross-Beeren and 
of Macdonald at the Katzbach with all 
their consequences, and was able to form 
a decision adapted to the circumstances, 
and this within a circuit of from thirty to 
sixty miles from Dresden, which was all 
the area that the disposition of his troops 
extended over at that time, we perceive 
the great obstacles which opposed them- 
selves in those days to the joint direction 
of independent bodies of troops, even 
when the distance between these was 
comparatively insignificant. 

Even with the introduction of railways 
and of the electric telegraph, these diffi- 
culties were not yet surmounted, owing 
to the deficiency of the technical organi- 
sation and the inadequate equipment of 



THE WORLD WAR 63 

the troops. On the eve of the battle of 
Koniggratz, there was no telegraphic con- 
nection between the main headquarters 
at Gitschin and the second army of the 
Crown Prince of Prussia. The command 
to join battle, dispatched at midnight, 
was delivered to the headquarters of the 
second army at Koniginhof at four o'clock 
in the morning of the 3d of July by the 
aide-de-camp, Lieutenant-Colonel Count 
Finckenstein, who had thus accomplished 
the night-ride of twenty-five miles by 
way of Miletin in four hours. Even the 
campaign of 1870-71 furnished numerous 
instances of defective and inadequate 
telegraphic connections. On the other 
hand, in this World War, telephones, 
telegraphy, and wireless telegraphy have 
placed the transmission of orders and 
news on a very much more secure foot- 
ing. The telephone has been able to 
convey orders and information into the 
very midst of a battle. Rides like those 



64 DEDUCTIONS FROM 

of Count Finckenstein on the night be- 
for Koniggratz have been replaced by 
journeys in motor-cars, and orders have 
been thereby transmitted with greater 
safety and far greater speed. More- 
over, by means of motor-cars and rail- 
ways, verbal consultations between the 
leaders or their deputies have been ren- 
dered possible. The conduct of the oper- 
ations as a whole has been placed on a 
far securer footing as compared with 
former days, as a result of the technical 
resources of the present day. And this 
was very necessary in view of the im- 
mense numbers and the vast distances 
which now had to be coped with. If 
technical science had been still in the 
same condition in which it was in 1870, 
the manipulation of armies and troops 
at the present day would have been 
a hopeless undertaking. But however 
valuable as regards the conduct of opera- 
tions has been the aid furnished by the 



THE WORLD WAR 65 

resources of modern times, it could not 
completely overcome the very great diffi- 
culties which had to be faced. Now as 
ever, war is the domain of frictions and 
uncertainty. 

The hitherto untried weapon of war 
furnished by aircraft brought about a 
number of new phenomena. The di- 
rigible airship, valuable as it has proved 
for reconnoitring at sea, has given way 
before the aeroplane in land warfare. 
The Zeppelins are extraordinarily sen- 
sitive. They have to keep at consider- 
able heights, because they provide very 
large targets. This reduces the accuracy 
with which they can aim bombs. They 
also need a large expenditure of labour 
and materials and they have to be housed 
in sheds. The brilliant invention of 
Count Zeppelin provided a weapon which, 
especially at the beginning of the War, 
was of great moral importance, and was 
also of indisputable value, because with 



6fl DEDUCTIONS FROM 

the Zeppelin we got over to England; 
but in this sphere also the large fighting 
aeroplane has taken its place. The im- 
portance of aeroplanes has considerably 
increased since it has become possible for 
them to keep at heights of far more than 
3000 metres, thereby reducing the danger 
from gunfire directed against them from 
the ground. German industry furnished 
our aviators with such an equipment as 
enabled them to establish more and more 
their superiority in the air. Aviation 
obviously has a great future. Its possi- 
bilities of development are many. 

The aeroplane proved itself a valuable 
means of reconnaissance, in connection 
both with strategy and tactics. In addi- 
tion, the captive balloon, with its more un- 
interrupted observation, rendered valuable 
service. Further, the photographs taken 
from aeroplanes furnished valuable assist- 
ance to the military command, above all 
in entrenched warfare, where other means 



THE WORLD WAR 67 

of reconnaissance couldf not be employed. 
By their aid, every alteration in the dis- 
positions of the enemy and all the organi- 
sation behind their front could be clearly 
made out. In the war of movement 
also rapid aeroplanes have been exten- 
sively used for reconnaissance. This 
comprehensive survey of the enemy was 
something new. Cavalry had never been 
able to achieve anything comparable to 
it, even in former times, when their op- 
portunities for reconnaissance were not 
restricted by the effectiveness of the 
weapons employed against them to any- 
thing like the same extent. Just as 
formerly cavalry engagements took place 
at the front of the lines for the purpose 
of routing the cavalry of the enemy and 
thereby gaining a view of their positions, 
so now air engagements take place on 
both sides with the aim of gaining a view 
of the enemy or frustrating a similar 
attempt on his part. Moreover, air- 



68 DEDUCTIONS FROM 

craft render very notable services in 
direct co-operation with the infantry as 
well as in the observation of artillery fire. 
The French at a very early stage accus- 
tomed themselves to the use of aircraft 
for observation, a plan which has since 
been imitated by us with constantly 
increasing success. 

Not only did aeroplanes make excur- 
sions over the enemy lines for purposes 
of reconnaissance, but also for purposes 
of bomb-throwing. Not only were the 
enemy harassed repeatedly by the bomb- 
ing of their quarters, their camp, their 
munition dumps and other establish- 
ments, but also troops concentrating for 
an offensive were attacked in this way 
with satisfactory results. Moreover, by 
raids into the enemy country carried out 
by squadrons of aircraft, we were able 
to inflict damage on fortifications, sources 
of military supplies, and other military 
establishments. In the course of these 



THE WORLD WAR 69 

raids some unfortified places without 
military significance have had to suffer. 
The bombardment of these places is in 
itself objectionable, but the limits of 
what is permissible are in this matter in 
many ways elastic. A new weapon opens 
up its own paths, as is shown, for ex- 
ample, by the submarine war. In any 
case, in this contest of nations with its 
economic background, the War is turned 
more and more against the enemy coun- 
tries, and the principle hitherto accepted 
that war is made only against the armed 
power of the enemy is, in this case as in other 
spheres, relegated to the background. 

In regard to the weapons which have 
proved most effective in the hands of the 
infantry, this World War, incredible as 
it may appear, has witnessed to a certain 
degree a retrograde development. The 
opposed forces, although equipped with 
long-distance rifles, were brought so close 
to one another, that they had recourse 



70 DEDUCTIONS FROM 

to the naked steel, and the hand-grenades 
of a past age were once again revived, 
though in an improved form. To be 
sure, instances occurred in the Russo- 
Japanese War, where the contending 
parties were for long periods in very close 
proximity to one another, and also in 
the Boer War many of the battles were 
fought, at any rate in part, at very close 
range; but the general tendency was to 
regard these as exceptions and to explain 
them as the result of local conditions or of 
the national characteristics of the con- 
tending parties, and to reckon the normal 
range of infantry fighting as from 800 to 
400 yards. Even with such an imperfect 
-weapon as was the needle-gun compared 
with the present-day magazine rifle, 
Moltke in 1865 unconditionally gave to 
firearms the first place as regards effect- 
iveness. He wrote^ : 

' Einfluss der verbesserten Feuerwaffen auf die Taktik. 
Taktisch-strategische Aufsdtze, p. 59. 



THE fVORLD WAR fx 

** Attack with the bayonet is the means 
with which finally to vanquish the enemy; 
no soldier vAW wish to abandon its use. 
The confidence of the men in the naked 
steel cannot be sufficiently aroused and 
encouraged, but its application must 
have been made possible by the previous 
course of the fight and have been prepared 
for by means of effective gunfire. . . . 
If the bayonet contests so frequently de- 
scribed in French accounts of the Italian 
campaign of 1859 were stripped of their 
dramatic glamour, if we could ascertain 
the simple prosaic truth, it would have 
to be admitted in reference to by far the 
greater number of them that the enemy 
had already been demoralised by more 
or less considerable losses and shunned 
a genuine encounter." 

Even prior to this date^ the Field- 
Marshal wrote: 

^ Kriegsgeschichtlicht Arheiten III. Der Italienisch* 
Feldzug des Jahres i8^g, p. 258. 



72 DEDUCTIONS FROM 

"General Niel, it is true, ascribes his 
victory (in the Battle of Solferino) to the 
bayonet. It may be resorted to when- 
ever the attack has been pushed to a 
struggle of man against man. As a 
general rule, this only occurs when it is 
presupposed that the opponent will not 
accept battle." 

We have already explained the psycho- 
logical factors which come into play in 
the World War and embitter it in a 
manner which had not to be reckoned 
with in the time of Moltke. The Field- 
Marshal, moreover, could not foresee 
when, in the essay we have quoted, he 
cited a few instances taken from the Wars 
of Liberation, in which attacks were 
made with clubs and bayonets "under 
conditions in which firearms could not 
be effective," that such conditions would, 
at a future date, present themselves 
repeatedly upon fronts extending for 
miles. 



THE WORLD WAR 73 

As with hand-grenade fighting, mine- 
warfare too suffered a kind of resurrec- 
tion in entrenched warfare. In the siege 
of Port Arthur it had already once again 
played an important part. It was only 
natural that from the moment that the 
operations took on the nature of a siege 
all the available weapons should be 
brought into play, both those which had 
been utilised previously and improved 
by the aid of modern technical science, 
and also those of recent invention. Thus, 
for warfare at close quarters, flame- 
throwers, bomb-throwers, the trench- 
mortars of earlier days in an improved 
form, trench cannon and muskets came 
into use, while the machine-guns acquired 
a growing importance, corresponding 
with their great increase in numbers. 
With the introduction of appliances for 
blowing gas from reservoirs and of gas- 
grenades, entirely new weapons of war 
made their appearance. And these in 



74 DEDUCTIONS FROM 

their turn called for special means of 
defence in the shape of gas-masks. The 
English and the French sought to pre- 
pare the way for their attacking troops 
by the employment of battle-motors — 
the so-called tanks. Altogether, this War, 
as a result of the development of modern 
technical science, has led to inventions 
and improvements such as no previous 
war has ever witnessed. It will always 
redound to the special glory of German 
industry, and above all of Germany's 
chemical industry, that in this sphere it 
engaged in and carried through a struggle 
against the industry of the whole world. 
The supplies of artillery ammunition 
which had been provided for the War 
proved in the case of all the belligerent 
States to be very far below the require- 
ments. Especially in the late autumn 
of 19 14, our troops found themselves 
more than once in a critical situation as a 
result of this shortage. None the less. 



THE WORLD fVAR 75 

it was impossible that such immense 
supplies as were actually required should 
have been stored up in peace time. Our 
industry, however, succeeded in satisfy- 
ing to an ever-increasing extent the 
demands which had to be made upon it; 
it was able, by its unaided effort, to keep 
pace with the enormous supplies which 
poured in to our enemies from America 
and (in the case of Russia) from Japan. 

As a result of the manner in which the 
positions were more and more adapted to 
the ground or artificially concealed, high- 
angle-firing artillery gained in import- 
ance. At the beginning we possessed in 
our numerous mobile heavy high-angle- 
fire batteries a certain superiority over the 
French, which, however, they were able 
in part to make up for by the extremely 
skilful use and appropriate grouped dis- 
position of their artillery. Later on in 
the War, the French and the English 
brought into action guns of very heavy 



76 DEDUCTIONS FROM 

calibre, which hurled immense quantities 
of shells against our trenches. 

These trenches, both with ourselves 
and with our enemies, and both in West 
and East, assumed more and more the 
character of fortifications, fitted with 
quickly manufactured wire entanglements 
such as only modern industry could have 
been equal to supplying in such enor- 
mous quantities. This fact, taken to- 
gether with the astonishing successes 
which our heaviest high-angle-fire artil- 
lery and also the motor-impelled Austro- 
Hungarian howitzers achieved against 
the Belgian and later against the Russian 
fortresses, has given rise to the idea that 
in future fortified trenches will take the 
place of fortresses. In any case it is 
certain that the old-fashioned fortresses 
are worthless, and, moreover, that the 
earlier notion, handed down from the 
Middle Ages, that positions had to be se- 
cured by means of fortresses, must finally 



THE WORLD WAR 77 

be discarded. It has long been among 
the things which have been outgrown. 
As early as 1809 Napoleon wrote^: "For- 
tresses like cannon are only weapons, 
which cannot of themselves fulfil their 
purpose; they must be properly manipu- 
lated and applied"; and in 1806 he said^ 
that in the construction of fortresses the 
same principles were applicable as in the 
disposition of troops. Fortresses are in- 
tended to assist operations, and since 
the course of the latter can never be fore- 
seen with absolute certainty, it might 
seem to be the best plan to construct 
them during the war wherever they 
are required. That, however, would be 
going too far. It will not be possible 
to dispense with certain previously pre- 
pared fortified points at places where 
only defensive tactics can be employed. 



' Corr. XVIII., No. 14707. Notes sur la defense de 
ritalie. 

' Corr. XIII., No. 10726. 



78 DEDUCTIONS FROM 

The fortifications on the French eastern 
frontier, above all Verdun and the forti- 
fied Moselle front, have demonstrated 
how valuable these may be. When the 
insufficiently-manned and widely-sepa- 
rated fortifications of the French eastern 
frontier in 1814 were described by those 
who opposed the notion of an invasion of 
France by the allies as "the impregnable 
front of France," this was a very great 
exaggeration. A century later, however, 
it became an actual fact. Even the 
powerful effectiveness of our heavy and 
heaviest artillery did not avail at Verdun 
to enable us to take the works every- 
where by storm in the further course of 
the attack, a proof that skilfully con- 
structed sunk fortifications, when they 
are favoured by the character of the 
ground, now as ever may be of great 
value. 

On the other hand, the practice of 
fortifying large towns seems now to have 



THE WORLD IVAR 79 

become obsolete. They had long lost 
their significance as centres of fortifica- 
tions, and in future they will have such 
significance only as places of refuge in 
the midst of fortified zones. Such forti- 
fied zones will still be required, in the 
sense that certain frontier districts will 
be secured by means of a succession of 
permanent forts which must be con- 
structed and maintained in time of peace, 
and to which must be linked certain other 
works to be taken in hand on the out- 
break of war, and for which the neces- 
sary materials must be in readiness. It 
is a question of constructing not a con- 
tinuous Limites Romani^ which only 
affords a mainly immovable defence, 
such as was several times forced upon us 
by circumstances during the World War, 

» The name of a continuous series of fortifications 
consisting of castles, walls, earthen ramparts, etc., erected 
by the Romans along the Rhine and the Danube, to 
protect their possessions from the attacks of the Germans. 
— Translator's Note. 



80 DEDUCTIONS FROM THE WAR 

but a succession of central points of 
defence, and this not in the shape of 
fortified towns, but of entrenchments 
of important areas. The World War 
has, as we shall explain, on the one hand 
confirmed anew the old truth that only 
by means of attack can decisive results 
be achieved, and that the war of move- 
ment and not entrenched warfare is the 
thing to be aimed at. On the other hand, 
it has revealed the immense power of a 
defence based upon well-constructed for- 
tifications, in view of the efi^ectiveness of 
modern weapons; and this revelation — 
more especially in view of our central 
geographical position — is of great value. 



IV 

LEADERSHIP 

In view of the development of modern 
technical science, it was inevitable that 
the World War should exhibit many- 
characteristics different from those of 
earlier wars. None the less, it would be 
a great error to declare all the experience 
gained from previous wars to be out of 
date. The human intelligence attaches 
itself involuntarily to what lies nearest. 
Those who turned to account the experi- 
ences of the Boer War and of the Man- 
churian campaign would have benefited 
by a warning against one-sidedness. We 
have already drawn attention to the 
fact that, notwithstanding the power and 
effectiveness of modern weapons, now as 
ever it is the moral element that is finally 

« 8i 



Sa DEDUCTIONS FROM 

decisive in war. The same is true of 
the intellectual element, of leadership. 
If the leaders were unwilling to consult 
the experiences of earlier wars, they 
would fall into a hopeless one-sidedness. 
As in every department of practical life, 
it is a question of finding the true rela- 
tion between knowledge and capacity. 
Clausewitz expresses it exactly when he 
says^: 

"He who intends to move In such an 
element as war must bring with him 
nothing at all gained from books save 
the education of his mind; if he brings 
with him ready-made ideas which have 
not been inspired in him by the shock of 
the moment, which he has not generated 
out of his own flesh and blood, the rush 
of events will overthrow his building 
before it is completed. He will never 
be understood by natural men and will 
enjoy least confidence precisely among 

^Vol. vii. Feldzug, 1812. 



THE WORLD WAR 83 

the most distinguished of them, that is 
to say, those who know themselves what 
they want." 

Thus the instruction gained from the 
past must be further developed and 
adapted to present-day conditions. This 
was done for his age by Moltke in exem- 
plary fashion. When he became the 
Chief of the General Staff he was already 
advanced in years, and although he 
possessed abundant practical experience 
and a comprehensive technical training, 
he had had no experience of European 
wars on a large scale. Hence he derived 
his opinions inevitably from the Napo- 
leonic wars, and he could do so without 
detriment. The masses of troops which 
he had subsequently to command were 
no larger than the armies of the last wars 
of the First Empire. The army corps 
of 1866 and 1870 still corresponded to 
some extent to what to-day has already 
reached the dimensions of an army or 



84 DEDUCTIONS FROM 

army-group. Moreover, the difference 
between the military weapons of Mohke's 
day and those of the previous Napoleonic 
era was less than the difference between 
those of our day and those of 1870, 
though the introduction of breechloaders 
and rifled barrels had even at that day 
marked an important advance in the 
technique of arms, and Moltke did in 
fact form a just estimate of their influence 
upon tactics. 

The war of 1870-71, like every other 
war, was not without its surprises. The 
importance of massed rifle-fire was only 
revealed by the effect of the chassepots 
of 1870. Indeed, Moltke himself, in 
his orders to the commanding officers of 
1869, recommended that the lines of 
sharpshooters should not fire till they 
were at a distance of 300 paces from the 
enemy, with the exception of the troops es- 
pecially designed for long-distance firing. 
On the morning of the i8th of August, 



THE WORLD WAR 85 

1870, the leader of the third army corps, 
Lieutenant-General von Alvensleben, 
expressed himself as follows to the 
commander of the first division of the 
foot-guards, Major-General von Paper 

"The chassepot fire has been under- 
estimated, and also to some extent the 
mitrailleuses. It is impossible for us to 
make any progress as the result of tactics 
practised on the drilling-ground; we must 
have more manoeuvring; we must de- 
velop and make use of even the most 
insignificant cover in the open country; 
above all we must employ our artillery 
long and continuously."' 

The fire of the breechloaders of small 
calibre proved very much more effective 
still against the English in the South 
African war. When they had been re- 
pulsed at Paardeburg on the i8th of 
February, 1900, with heavy losses, Lord 

' Studien zur Kriegsgeschichte und Taktik. V. Der 
18 August, 1870, p. 407. 



86 DEDUCTIONS FROM 

Kitchener said the next day: "If I had 
known yesterday what I know to-day, 
I should not have attacked the Boers in 
the river- valley; it is impossible in the 
face of the modern rifle." 

The fact that exercise in time of peace 
does not afford any real test of the eff^ect- 
iveness of the enemy's fire will play an 
important part at the opening of every 
campaign. Even the most perfect mili- 
tary training cannot protect us against 
the element of incalculability which con- 
fronts us in this field. It can only 
satisfy to a limited extent the demands 
of the case. 

In the sphere of instruction, Field- 
Marshal Count Schlieffen, no less than 
Moltke before him, even if, like the 
latter, he could not foresee the phe- 
nomena which the present War has en- 
gendered down to their every detail, none 
the less was always at pains to discipline 
and prepare the mind of the nation with 



THE WORLD WAR 87 

a view to the demands of present-day 
war. For Instance, in 1909, when he 
had already retired from office, he wrote: 
"One direct consequence of the im- 
provement of firearms is a greater exten- 
sion of the fighting-front. Thus it has 
come about that while, in the battles of 
the last two centuries, all weapons and 
reserves included, on an average ten to 
fifteen men were reckoned to a metre of 
battle-line, and even forty years ago ten 
men to the pace was the ordinary reck- 
oning, in the war in Eastern Asia of 
1904-5 three men to the metre, or in case 
of need even less, was the ordinary rule. 
Neither of the contending parties entered 
the war with a fixed theory as to the 
extension of the fighting-fronts, or en- 
deavoured to apply the notions which he 
had formed in time of peace. The long 
fighting-fronts have been the result of the 
force of circumstances and of the natural 
desire to take cover and at the same time 



88 DEDUCTIONS FROM 

to secure the full effectiveness of first- 
rate weapons. Beyond doubt, therefore, 
the phenomena which made their ap- 
pearance in the Far East will be repeated 
in a European war. The battlefields of 
the future, therefore, will and must be 
of quite a different extent from those 
which we know from past experience. 
Armies of the same strength as those of 
Koniggratz and Gravelotte-St. Privat 
will occupy more than four times the 
space that they occupied at that day. 
But what will the 220,000 men of Ko- 
niggratz and the 186,000 men of Grave- 
lotte signify, as compared with the masses 
which will certainly take the field in a 
future war!" 

The tendency in the direction of vast 
numbers was in fact exhibited on all sides 
in the World War to a very striking 
degree. Count Schlieffen recognised at 
an early date that this was bound to 
happen. Our successes in the World War 



THE WORLD WAR 89 

have been to a large extent due to his 
untiring efforts to train the General 
Staff and our higher command for a 
war of masses. His successor, Colonel- 
General von Moltke, adhered to the 
fundamental ideas of Schlieffen. Thus 
the beginning of the campaign in the West 
in August, 19 14, developed in the main 
in accordance with Schlieffen's views. 
If at that time no decisive victory fell 
to our share, and our strength proved 
insufficient to vanquish France, we 
must none the less consider that up to 
the Marne we had achieved enormous 
things. 

"In the very moment of accomplish- 
ment the completion of the battle was 
abandoned for far-reaching general rea- 
sons. . . . The battle was broken off 
by the German Supreme Command, and, 
in view of the general situation, a strategic 
retreat to a new line was ordered." 

This is the judgment of a neutral 



90 DEDUCTIONS FROM 

writer'^ on the Battle of the Marne, and 
certainly it would have taken very little to 
turn the scale so that the victory might 
have fallen to us and a retreat been 
avoided. But the really decisive factor 
was that the German offensive was no 
longer strong enough to break through in 
the face of an enemy country bristling with 
armaments. The withdrawal of the Ger- 
man armies after the dazzling successes 
which had been achieved at the begin- 
ning could not but in the nature of 
things cause bitter disappointment at 
home. It ought, however, to be borne in 
mind that, if Moltke was able to achieve 
a Metz and a Sedan, he none the less had 
at his disposal forces considerably su- 
perior in numbers to those of the enemy, 
since, at the beginning of the war of 1870, 
the numbers of the German forces as 
compared to the French were in the ratio 
of 5 to 3. At the beginning of the War 

' Stegemann, loc. cit., i., 211. 



THE WORLD WAR 91 

of 1914, on the other hand, the armed 
force of France alone was sHghtly in 
excess of the whole mobilised strength 
of Germany, while if we deduct the Ger- 
man forces employed in the East and 
those which were in the first instance kept 
at home for coast defence, the French, 
English, and Belgians possessed a numeri- 
cal superiority of something like three- 
quarters of a million men. In addition 
to this, when the German Western army 
engaged in the Battle of the Marne, its 
original first-line troops had been re- 
duced not only by two army corps which 
had been sent to the East, but also by 
two further army corps which it had 
been necessary to leave behind at Ant- 
werp and Maubeuge. 

It is the old phenomenon of the wear- 
ing down of forces in the course of an 
offensive which we here encounter anew. 
In the autumn of 1805 Napoleon crossed 
the Rhine and the Main with more than 



92 DEDUCTIONS FROM 

200,000 men; at Austerlitz he engaged 
with only 75,000. At Eylau, out of the 
200,000 men which he had at his disposal 
after the arrival of the contingent of the 
Rhenish Confederation in North Germany, 
he could send into action only 60,000 
men, not to speak of the rapid dwindling 
away of his great army in Russia in 18 12. 
In spite of the considerable superiority 
which we possessed in 1870-71 at the 
beginning of the war, and of the fact that 
the total strength of the German troops 
which gradually crossed the French fron- 
tier, amounted, all told, to 1,147,000 
men; in spite of the enormous successes 
which we achieved at that time; none the 
less, owing to the unexpectedly long 
resistance which France with the aid 
of her new formations opposed to us, 
we found ourselves more than once, 
during the second period of the war, 
faced with a very serious and critical 
situation. A powerful offensive, aiming 



THE WORLD WAR 93 

at the overthrow of the enemy, has almost 
always led up to a situation in which it 
was proved to lack the necessary troops 
in order to pursue its purpose to the end 
with complete security. Clausewitz ex- 
presses this whea he says: "Every attack 
must lead to defence."^ 

Napoleon, when he was still General 
Buonaparte, insisted once to General 
Moreau, on the importance of numbers 
as a decisive factor in war.* He said: 
"Victory falls in the final event to the 
biggest battalions.'* Moreau is said 
to have retorted that this was quite 
correct in itself, but that in point of fact 
Napoleon himself had just proved in 
Italy that superiority of numbers does 
not always decide. "Does it not often 
happen that numerical superiority is 
compensated for by bravery, experi- 



^ On War, vol. iii., p. 4. [Vom Kriege. Skixzen sum 
VIL B., 2 Kap.] 

^ Pierron, Methodes dc guerre, i. 



94 DEDUCTIONS FROM 

ence, discipline, and, above all, by the 
talent of the leader?" To which Buona- 
parte replied: "In a battle, certainly, 
but in a whole war seldom." Victories 
used up armies slowly but just as surely 
as defeats. 

Thus the German offensive at the be- 
ginning of September, 19 14, was not 
powerful enough to effect the overthrow 
of the enemy. The intention was to 
effect an envelopment from two sides. 
The envelopment by the left wing of the 
army, was, however, brought to a stand- 
still before the fortifications of the French 
eastern frontier, which, in view of the 
prompt successes achieved against the 
Belgian fortifications, it had been hoped 
to overcome. The envelopment of the 
French left wing was successful up to 
in front of Paris and across the Marne, 
but here the German troops found their 
frontal advance arrested, while they in 
their turn were threatened with an en- 



THE WORLD IVAR 95 

velopment. The defensive tactics of the 
leaders of the French army were rendered 
very much easier owing to the strong 
support which the fortifications on the 
eastern frontier gave to their wing, and 
also the possibility of effecting rapid 
transfers of troops afforded by a very 
convenient network of railways and a 
very numerous supply of motor wagons 
upon good roads. Moreover, they com- 
manded the inner, shorter line. At the 
same time, even apart from this, it was 
proved on the Marne that the age of 
armies numbering millions, with their 
improved armament and the widely ex- 
tended fronts which they necessitate, 
engenders very special conditions. On 
the Vistula and in Galicia in October, 
19 14, at Lodz and after the winter battle 
at the Masurian Lakes, as well as in the 
autumn of 19 15 at Vilna, the same phe- 
nomena always made their appearance, 
even though the conditions of extent and 



96 DEDUCTIONS FROM 

character of the ground, as well as the 
main course of events, were in each case 
completely different. Forces which suffice 
to achieve victory and even to destroy 
strong sections of the enemy's forces 
prove inadequate for the attainment of 
the complete success which is desired. 
The individual armies of the enemy may 
be enveloped — as happened at Tannen- 
burg and later at Hermannstadt, where 
the "Cannae'* of Schlieffen was realised, 
but the envelopment of the whole host 
of the enemy is a very difficult matter. 
In order to accomplish it at the Marne, 
we should have required yet another 
army, disposed in echelon behind the 
right German wing, while on the East 
the possibility of any effective envelop- 
ing movement was very much restricted. 
The vast extent of their territory always 
made it possible for the Russians to effect 
a withdrawal. Their railway network, 
though of wide mesh, was extraordinarily 



THE WORLD WAR 97 

favourable from a strategic point of view, 
and by its aid they were generally able 
to bring up reinforcements at the right 
time to any wing that was threatened, 
while, in the case of ourselves and our 
allies, our railway communications were 
not only very circuitous, but, when it 
came to a further advance, ceased alto- 
gether. In addition to this, with the 
extension of the Eastern theatre of war, 
a blow inflicted on one wing of the Rus- 
sians could not have the same effect on 
the other sectors of their long front as 
would have been the case if it had been 
of less extent. 

Hence break-through tactics, which 
Napoleon attempted several times on the 
restricted battlefields of his age, supported 
by powerful heavy artillery, once again 
asserted their importance. Instances of 
this were furnished at GorHce, in the 
later battles in Galicia, as well as between 
the Bug and the Vistula, in the breaking 



98 DEDUCTIONS FROM 

of the Russian Narew front in the summer 
of 1915, and in the break-through at 
Tarnopol in 19 17. Also the Serbian and 
above all the Roumanian campaigns 
furnished several similar instances. The 
preliminary condition of success was 
always a moral and tactical superiority 
on the side of the attacker, and a cor- 
responding violence of mass effect. The 
fact that we did not possess this moral 
and tactical superiority in sufficient 
measure in the West has always relegated 
to the background the idea of breaking 
through the enemy front. What has to 
be done is not only on a comparatively 
limited front to break in upon the enemy 
with concentrated masses — these masses 
will immediately be exposed to outflank- 
ing on both sides — but to force in a more 
or less considerable part of the enemy 
front, and then to develop strategically 
the break-through which has succeeded 
tactically. The extent of the success 



THE WORLD WAR 99 

will in every case depend upon the local 
conditions and the strategic situation. 

The importance of envelopment, both 
strategic envelopment and tactical en- 
velopment, of course remains very great. 
Clausewitz says^: **A complete victory 
requires an enveloping attack on a battle 
with an oblique front, for these two forms 
always give the result a decisive char- 
acter." Moltke furnished proof of this at 
Koniggratz, Metz, and Sedan. Schliefifen, 
who made it his chief object to keep the 
desire for the annihilation of the enemy 
alive in the German army through the 
long period of peace, developed in his 
" Cannae " the conditions for a battle of 
annihilation on classical lines. Even if, 
as the World War has shown, his doctrines 
frequently have to be modified, when 
they are applied to conditions of very 
large scale, none the less this War too has 

' On War, vol. iii., p. 155. [Vom Kriege. Skizzen zum 
VII. B., 2 Kap.] 



loo DEDUCTIONS FROM 

furnished instances where the envelop- 
ment of a whole host might have been 
effected and would have had very far- 
reaching consequences. Such an oppor- 
tunity was presented to our opponents 
on the Western front after the Battle of 
the Marne. By making use of their 
convenient and efficient railway network 
and their numerous columns of motor 
wagons, they might have hurled at the 
proper moment powerful forces against 
the right flank of the German army and 
thereby prevented us from establishing 
our positions on the Aisne and to the 
west of the Belgian frontier. Since, 
however, they had not achieved a tactical 
success at the Marne at all, they lacked 
the strength and the capacity for such 
an undertaking. They pressed their at- 
tack only in a frontal direction. The 
German forces at once resumed in part 
an offensive attitude, and by this means 
arrested the progress of the enemy forces 



THE WORLD WAR loi 

opposed to them. They strengthened the 
right wing of their army, and were al- 
ways able to oppose adequate forces to 
the striking movement of the French 
pursuing army when the latter at length 
(but too late) set itself in motion, and 
this even though the railway network 
in Belgium and North France had not 
yet been restored to anything like full 
efficiency. 

After the Battle of the Marne, the War 
in the West assumed on the German side 
first of all the character of a defence 
accompanied by offensive tactics, and 
subsequently, after the attack at the 
Yser had proved unsuccessful and when 
further troops had to be conveyed to the 
East, was completely transformed at the 
end of November, 19 14, into an entrenched 
war. It ought, however, to be realised 
that though in the World War entrenched 
fighting has gained such prevalence and 
importance, this is not necessarily a result 



102 DEDUCTIONS FROM 

of the highly developed technical science 
of our age, but first and foremost the 
result of the inability of our enemies to 
break through the German fronts in the 
East and the West. If the armies of 
the two contending parties had been 
equally efficient, it would have been im- 
possible for us to maintain our positions 
for any length of time, in view of the 
overwhelming numerical superiority of 
the forces which were directed against 
ourselves and Austria-Hungary from all 
sides. It lay with our opponents with 
their vast numbers, when they had forced 
us to retreat, to give to the War once 
again the character of a war of movement. 
They did not succeed in doing so. On 
the other hand, the forces of the Central 
Powers were insufficient to enable them 
to push the offensive to any considerable 
extent beyond the permanent positions 
taken up on the Western front at the end 
of 1914 and on the Eastern front in the 



THE IVORLD WAR 103 

autumn of 1915, and on their side to pass 
once more to the war of movement. This 
was reserved in the further course of 
events for the Serbian and (a year later) 
the Roumanian theatres of war. In 
view of our central position, we were 
obliged, since we had not succeeded in 
breaking through at the Marne, to con- 
tent ourselves with an "offensive with a 
limited goal," to use the words of Clause- 
witz. He says further: "A defence which 
is organised on conquered territory has 
a much more irritating character than 
one upon our own soil: The offensive 
principle is engrafted on it in a certain 
measure/'^ The course of the World 
War has quite confirmed this. Biit at 
the same time this view involves the 
admission that the maintenance of such 
a defence ought in itself to be considered 
as an important success. Apart from 

^ On War, vol. iii., p. 72. \Vom Kriege. Skizzen zum 
VII. B., 26 Kap.] 



104 DEDUCTIONS FROM 

this offensive defensive, the only possi- 
biUty for the Central Powers could be to 
anticipate the enemy's actions in particu- 
lar cases, as was done by our army at 
Verdun and by the Austro-Hungarian 
army in the Venetian Alps; the initiative 
as a whole we were obliged to leave 
to the enemy. Consequently, we were 
driven to the tenacious, to a large extent 
passive, retention of our entrenched lines, 
and to their consolidation with the aid 
of every means furnished by the art of 
field-fortification. 

According to the notions that prevailed 
up to that time, the possibility might 
have been considered, where our troops 
were suffering heavy losses as a result of 
holding on under exposure to the fire of 
the enemy's heaviest artillery and bomb- 
throwers, and where the latter had done 
destruction to our trenches, of allowing 
the enemy to break through, and then 
driving him back again by means of the 



THE WORLD IVAR 105 

reserves at the back of our lines. This 
procedure was, in fact, from the begin- 
ning employed several times with success 
at various sections of the front against 
bodies of the enemy forces which had 
broken through. To extend it system- 
atically to larger sections of the front, and 
thereby on our side to resort to a certain 
extent to the methods of the war of 
movement, seemed to the Supreme Com- 
mand for a long time inadvisable, in view 
of the limited forces and artillery at 
thtir disposition. Experience had, more- 
over, shown how difficult it is to straighten 
out salients which have once been formed 
on an entrenched front. Even when 
salients have been enveloped, they have, 
by the very nature of modern methods 
of fighting and effectiveness of weapons 
in entrenched warfare, been held both by 
ourselves and by our enemies, in so far 
as the nature of the ground made this 
possible. 



io6 DEDUCTIONS FROM 

The more and more insistent attempts 
of our enemies to prepare the way for 
their infantry by the mechanical power 
of bomb-throwers and heavy artillery 
led to a different method of defensive 
fighting. The German Army Report of 
the 17th of April, 19 17, describes it 
briefly in the following words : 

"In the presence of modern artillery 
fire, which flattens out positions and 
produces broad deep craters, rigid defence 
is no longer possible. The struggle is 
no longer for a line, but for a whole 
deeply echeloned fortified zone. So the 
contest for the foremost positions surges 
this way and that, with the aim, even if 
it involves the loss of implements of war, 
of saving the lives of the men, and at the 
same time of weakening the enemy by 
inflicting on him severe and sanguinary 
losses.'* 

This procedure preserved the lives and 
at the same time the morale of the troops. 



THE WORLD WAR 107 

who now no longer saw themselves to the 
same extent as hitherto exposed without 
means of defence to the devastating fire 
of the enemy. The enemy could be 
allowed to boast of his slight local suc- 
cesses, if only his attempts to break 
through were frustrated. It remained 
none the less a prerequisite condition of 
this new procedure that adequate re- 
serves of troops for the counter-thrust, 
as well as munitions, should be at hand. 
Deficiencies in both these respects were 
revealed more than once in the defensive 
engagements of the years 1915 and 1916 
on the Western front. 

It did not seem advisable to leave 
large sections of the front open to the 
enemy with a view to subsequently 
meeting him in a great offensive engage- 
ment on the French or Belgian territory 
occupied by us, thereby giving the situa- 
tion quite a different character from a 
strategic point of view. Such a counter- 



io8 DEDUCTIONS FROM 

attack on a large scale would have in- 
volved the reconquest of the newly- 
organised enemy positions, and if the 
counter-attack did not effect a complete 
recovery, this method would in course of 
time have amounted to the surrender of 
larger and larger portions of the enemy 
territor}^ occupied by our troops. To be 
sure, many of our positions exhibited 
serious defects, since their selection was 
not the result of forethought and a free 
choice; they were situated wherever our 
own or the enemy's attack had been 
brought to a standstill in the autumn of 
19 14. Moreover, quite apart from the 
moral factor, which in these days of 
extreme publicity has quite another 
significance than was formerly the case, 
and apart from the endeavours of the 
enemy Press to exploit for their own ends 
even our most trifling reverses, such 
reverses as were inevitable from time to 
time, the objects at stake were far too 



THE WORLD IVAR 109 

precious to justify us in yielding up large 
stretches of territory, even if it were 
only temporarily. We had to strive to 
turn to the best possible account the 
productive district of Northern France, 
with its wealth of industries. 

The shifting back of portions of our 
front in the district of the Ancre, the 
Somme, and the Oise at the end of the 
winter of 19 16-17 did not take place 
until the situation as a whole had been 
to a certain extent transformed, and 
after we had been able to prepare stronger 
and more favourable positions in the 
rear. This evacuation of the front line 
took the enemy more or less by surprise. 
Our skilfully executed withdrawal re- 
sulted in considerable losses to the 
enemy when they subsequently pressed 
forward, while we gained time as well as 
greater security and husbanded our 
forces. Moreover, it was only the 
most westward projections of our 



no DEDUCTIONS FROM 

front which were concerned in this 
withdrawal. 

According to Clausewitz, war must be 
subject to the one supreme law of 
decision by force of arms. In this sense 
did Frederick the Great, Napoleon, and 
Moltke conduct their operations. With 
them it was a question of the annihila- 
tion of the enemy's forces, not of the 
winning and keeping of provinces. If 
the entrenched battles of the present 
War had for their purpose the holding of 
ground that had been won, none the less 
the implied contradiction with the theo- 
ries of the greatest generals of modern 
times is only apparent. In the World 
War it was a question of battle-fronts 
which we held and in contending for 
which our opponents sacrificed the blood 
of their troops, and not of a cordon of 
positions after the fashion of those of 
the eighteenth century. The entrenched 
lines of that time served principally to 



THE IVORLD WAR in 

keep the enemy at a distance, and as 
far as possible to obviate a pitched battle. 
Considering the inadequacy of the means 
of attack at that time and of the old 
hired armies, as well as the inferior 
mobility and deficient driving force of 
a linear ordrg de bataille they frequently 
fulfilled their purpose. 

When, however, war was dominated 
by the will of a powerful leader, it took 
on immediately quite a different aspect. 
Nevertheless it must not be overlooked 
that even Napoleon frequently advocates 
entrenched positions, and that he him- 
self at times, when his troops had been 
brought to a standstill, had recourse to 
them, for instance in 1807 at the Passarge, 
and in the auturnn of 18 13, when, though 
his defence remained mobile, he con- 
structed extensive temporary fortifica- 
tions on the Elbe. Frederick the Great, 
too, finally adapted himself to a Bunzel- 
witz. Already at the conclusion of the 



112 DEDUCTIONS FROM 

campaign of 1758, he admitted^ that to 
attack the enemy without having first 
secured for oneself a superiority as re- 
gards firearms would be much as if a 
mob armed with cudgels were to engage 
an armed military force; that it was 
necessary to adopt the Austrian system 
of a powerful artillery, however inconven- 
ient this might be; and that lessons 
might be learnt from the enemy in regard 
to the skilful exploitation of the ground. 

"The best infantry in the world," he 
said, "may in certain cases be thrown 
into disorder, when it has to contend 
against the enemy, his guns, and dis- 
advantages of ground. Our own in- 
fantry, enfeebled and demoralised alike 
by victories and defeats, demand to be 
sparingly employed for difficult under- 
takings. One must be guided by a 
consideration of their intrinsic worth.'* 

After the Seven Years' War, the King 

' Betrachtungen iiber die Taktik, etc. 



THE IVORLD WAR 113 

gave even more emphatic expression to 
these views in the mihtary section of his 
Politisches Testament vom Jahre iy68. 
In this he says: *'We must reckon upon 
the possibility of a mere contest for en- 
trenched positions (Postenkrieg) with the 
Austrians"; and he says further: 

"Formerly victories were won by the 
courage and strength of an army; now it 
is always the artillery that decides, and 
the skill of a general consists in bringing 
up his troops against the enemy without 
allowing them to be crushed before the 
beginning of the offensive proper." 

Although the conduct of war at the 
time of Frederick the Great, being based 
upon entirely different political and eco- 
nomic conditions, vvas quite different 
from our conduct of war, none the less 
it engendered many phenomena, as is 
proved by the King's observations, which 
have been repeated in the present World 
War, though in a different form. In 



114 DEDUCTIONS FROM 

any case it is clear from the words of 
King Frederick that both during and 
after the Seven Years' War he was con- 
stantly at pains, pen in hand, to attain 
clearness with regard to the most im- 
portant questions of the military art. 
We may well see in this an exhortation 
that we should apply to every innova- 
tion that is to be introduced the touch- 
stone of the experiences of previous wars, 
if we desire to be preserved from one- 
sidedness. 

Hence it would be wrong to maintain 
that, in the future, entrenched warfare 
must necessarily play such a dominant 
part as it has played in the present War. 
Even King Frederick speaks of an en- 
trenched war against the Austrians only 
as a consequence of their skill in choosing 
favourable positions. That, even in his 
later years, he still conceded the chief 
importance to decision on the field of 
battle is evident from his plans for the 



THE WORLD WAR 115 

Bavarian War of Succession, and in 
spite of the inaction which, as it turned 
out, marked the course of this armed 
demonstration — for it was really nothing 
else — here too he had based his chief 
hopes upon a "good battle'* in Moravia. 
We shall have to consider how, in 
future, to preserve for war the character 
of the war of movement, all the more so 
since, in the World War, it has only been 
by the war of movement that we have 
reaped decisive results. It will, of course, 
be accompanied by many of the features 
of entrenched warfare, and, in conse- 
quence of the necessity of bringing up 
and setting in operation the numerous 
present-day methods of attack, it will be 
slow. An approximate illustration of 
this is furnished by the course of the 
operations in East Prussia and Lithuania 
and of the Germano-Austro-Hungarian 
offensive in Galicia and Poland in the 
summer of 1915, as well as by the 



ii6 DEDUCTIONS FROM 

campaigns in Serbia, Transylvania, and 
Roumania; and the rapid progress of 
operations in these instances furnishes 
convincing proof that the resolute will 
of a leader, combined with the valour 
of his troops, is capable of overcoming 
those difficulties which the bringing up of 
their numerous weapons of war entails 
upon a modern army. For this kind of 
warfare we ourselves had received just 
the appropriate training, and we were 
in fact superior to all the other armies. 
Such a form of warfare is decisive, and 
will always remain decisive; the years 
which we have spent in our trenches do 
not alter this fact in any way. 

That spirit of the offensive which is 
peculiar to our army we must study to 
preserve by every means in our power. 
It has achieved striking results in this 
War, and has recently once again proved 
its effectiveness in the summer of 19 17 
in Eastern Galicia and in the defensive 



THE WORLD WAR 117 

battles in North France and Flanders. 
But we must not lose sight of the fact 
that from time to time, at the beginning, 
a systematic adherence to offensive tac- 
tics, even where the situation rendered 
it more advisable to make full use of 
the strength which the effectiveness of 
present-day weapons gives to defensive 
tactics, cost us a heavy sacrifice. In any 
case the War has proved that the asser- 
tion often made in time of peace that the 
spade digs the grave of the offensive is 
not correct. This assertion may be com- 
pared with the saying which was current 
in the Prussian army, to its very great 
detriment, before the battle of Jena: 
"Skirmishing encourages the scoundrel 
in human nature." From the military 
point of view Goethe is right when he 
says: "For it is just where ideas are 
lacking that a phrase is most welcome." 
Catch- words are always prejudicial in 
their effect, and most of all so when it is 



ii8 DEDUCTIONS FROM 

a question of the blood of our sons and 
brothers. It was not only King Frederick 
who expressed his sense of the importance 
of selecting strong positions. Napoleon, 
the representative of the most uncom- 
promising offensive, told the officers of his 
engineer-corps in 1806 that in the coming 
campaign against Prussia he intended 
that a very great quantity of earth should 
be shovelled up.^ And Moltke writes^: 

"The offensive is by no means merely 
tactical. A clever military leader will 
succeed in many cases in choosing defen- 
sive positions of such an offensive nature 
from a strategic point of view that the 
opponent is compelled to attack us in 
them. ... A strategical offensive con- 
sorts very well with a tactical defence." 

It was, it is true, as early as 1865 that 
the Chief of the General Staff of the 



* Foucart. Jena. 

' Taktisch-Strategische Aufsdtze. Bemerkungen uber 
den Einfluss der verbesserten Feuerwaffen. 



THE WORLD WAR 119 

Prussian army wrote those words: "But 
he belonged to the number of those great 
and rare men in whose case a profound 
study of theory has almost been a sub- 
stitute for practice."^ Thus Konig- 
gratz, Metz, and Sedan did not cause him 
to alter his views materially. Again, in 
1874, he says: 

"I am convinced that, as a result of 
the improvement of firearms, the tactical 
defensive has acquired a great advantage 
(from a local tactical point of view) over 
the offensive. It is true that in the cam- 
paign of 1870 we always took the offen- 
sive and that we attacked and captured 
the strongest positions of the enemy, but 
with what a sacrifice.? It seems to me 
to be more advantageous only to proceed 
to an offensive after having repelled 
several attacks by the enemy."^ 



' Dragomirow. Skizzen des OesterreichiscA-Preuss- 
ischen Krieges im Jahre 1866. 
^ Taktische Aufgaben. 



120 DEDUCTIONS FROM 

The Field-Marshal certainly did not 
overlook the fact that such an opportu- 
nity of this nature as presented itself to 
Napoleon at Austerlitz occurs but sel- 
dom and cannot be created at will. It is 
sufficient, then, to draw attention to the 
fact that any leader who has recourse to 
defence, wherever this is in conformity 
with the situation, is showing himself in 
full agreement with the greatest military 
leaders of the past. 

War is, to quote the well-known phrase 
of Clausewitz, "the continuation of poli- 
tics by other means." It has already 
been mentioned that it has resulted from 
the political and economic situation that 
we and our allies have had to wage battle 
on the two fronts under difficulties which 
had hitherto not been suspected and 
which have continually increased. It 
was this that gave rise to the peculiar 
form of the present War, as well as to 
the necessity, notwithstanding the power 



THE WORLD WAR 121 

of the blows which we dealt, of continu- 
ally husbanding the forces at our dis- 
posal. Hence the judgment pronounced 
by Clausewitz on the conduct of King 
Frederick in the year 1760 is fully appli- 
cable to our Supreme Command. He 
said': "The whole campaign exhibits a 
husbanding of forces, accompanied by 
the greatest activity and skill.'* Numer- 
ous other comparisons with the Seven 
Years' War present themselves, only that 
as the theatre of war, in place of the 
Eastern and Central districts of Ger- 
many on which Frederick the Great 
fought, we must substitute Europe. Just 
as at that time Prussian regiments fought 
at Rossbach and a month later at Leu- 
then, so now our army corps and divi- 
sions have fought first in the West, then 
in the East, then in the Balkans, and 
vice versa. Just as Frederick the Great 

' Vol. X., Strategische Beleuchtung mehrerer Feldzuge. 
Friedrich der Grosse. 



122 DEDUCTIONS FROM 

at that time held the inner line, so did we 
also in the World War. This has proved 
to be to our advantage (just as it proved 
to Frederick's advantage), even though 
the difficulties of the situation as a whole 
still remained. If, as we hope, policy 
succeeds in future in preventing the re- 
currence of such a menacing situation, 
or at any rate in producing the effect 
that we shall have greater freedom for 
violent and decisive blows in one direc- 
tion, then the War will take a different 
shape and will be more like former wars. 
Our business, therefore, is to maintain 
the fundamental ideas of war as they 
lived in the German army up to the 
year 1914, to soak them in the experi- 
ences of the present War, and to make 
the fullest technical use of these experi- 
ences, but to do all this without giving 
an entirely new direction to our think- 
ing on strategy and tactics. We can 
only strive continually after perfection; 



THE WORLD IVAR 123 

we cannot attain it. Even King Fred- 
erick had to resign himself to this fact. 
In the Testament of 1768 he writes: 

"The military art demands continual 
study, if one wishes to attain a thorough 
mastery of it. I am far from flattering 
myself that I have exhausted it. I am 
even of opinion that a human lifetime 
is not long enough in order to pursue it 
to the very end, because with every fresh 
campaign I have acquired new views as 
the result of new experiences, and be- 
cause there still remain a multitude of 
things concerning which fate has not 
permitted me to collect any experience." 

Even less than at the time of Frederick 
the Great, when conditions remained in 
all essential respects unchanged, and such 
alterations as occurred in the weapons 
of war were insignificant as compared 
with to-day, can we now tell whether 
the next campaign will not cause us to 
form new views. Napoleon once de- 



124 DEDUCTIONS FROM 

clared that one must alter one's tactics 
every ten years, if one wished to main- 
tain one's superiority. We proceeded 
in accordance with this principle prior 
to the War. Our armaments were at 
the highest level of efficiency; our ser- 
vice regulations were entirely up to date 
and adapted to the most recent experi- 
ences of war, in particular the experience 
of the Russo-Japanese war. This in 
itself is an indication that the World War 
need not effect revolutionary changes; 
in fact it is impossible that it should do 
so. On the whole, our training was quite 
on the right lines. The wide scope which 
our regulations always allowed made it 
easy for the troops to adapt themselves 
to the needs resulting from the effect of 
modern weapons. Thus they adapted 
themselves to the entrenched warfare to 
which they were unaccustomed and which 
they disliked. The principles for attack- 
ing enemy positions and for the defence 



THE WORLD IVAR 125 

of one's own have, as we have already- 
mentioned, been changed several times, 
in accordance with the conduct of the 
enemy and the nature and strength of 
his weapons. In matters of detail new 
experiences have been gleaned over and 
over again, but the fundamental tendency 
of our regulations has not really been 
affected. It has been proved they were 
right in everywhere giving precedence to 
mind over form, for that adaptability 
which had been inculcated in our whole 
army down to the man in the ranks 
proved decisive. It resulted in the fact 
that the spirit and the nature of this War 
were recognised in the army long before 
they were generally recognised at home. 
It is true that during the long peace the 
army had become very inert in many 
respects. Innovations were only tardily 
adopted. Many tried to extract from 
the regulations a compromise between 
what was old and past and what was new 



126 DEDUCTIONS FROM 

and enduring. In this they overlooked 
the fact that even enduring things will 
constantly call for improvements. This 
applies also to the experiences afforded 
by this World War. They cannot con- 
tinue indefinitely to be authoritative any 
more than the experiences of earlier 
wars, if only because the development of 
technical science both on the land and 
in the air can never come to a standstill. 
Above all, the individual must impress 
upon himself that a certain partiality 
must always attach to his own particular 
experiences. Our troops have exhibited 
a striking faculty of adapting themselves 
to circumstances, but the same cannot 
be said of all their officers; and this pro- 
longed trench warfare in itself has a 
dangerous tendency to engender a one- 
sided view. It has also to be remem- 
bered that the conditions in the East 
and the West respectively were entirely 
different. 



THE WORLD WAR 127 

A certain inertia, however, in the case 
of such a great organism as is presented 
by the army, although it may prove a 
hindrance on occasion, has also its good 
side. A certain amount of conservatism 
is indispensable; it helps to secure a 
continuous progress, and not a progress 
by leaps and bounds. We have already 
shown that the fact that a thing is old 
is by no means necessarily a reason for 
discarding it; we have been able to point 
to many phenomena similar to those of 
the time of Moltke, Napoleon, nay, even 
of Frederick the Great. Of course these 
similarities are only evident when we 
consider the thing as a whole. The 
tactics of 1870-71 had become out of 
date long before the World War, and 
occasional reversions to them, such as 
occurred with us here and there before 
the War, will now have to be renounced 
once and for all. Within certain limits, 
however, the phenomena of war repeat 



128 DEDUCTIONS FROM THE WAR 

themselves not infrequently, although 
the form is always altered, and they 
have to be duly adapted to present 
conditions. 



THE ARMY IN THE FUTURE 

Although the effect of the World War 
has by no means been to revolutionise 
military art completely, none the less it 
is incumbent upon us to draw from it a 
number of lessons both as regards the 
further development of our army and 
also as regards our mode of training. 

From the point of view of organisation 

it must first of all be realised that no 

organisation can possibly cover all the 

possible contingencies of war, and that, 

therefore, it is of the first importance to 

make it as elastic and adaptable as 

possible. In the course of the World 

War the attempt to preserve the original 

formations, and thereby to secure the 

continuous influence of the leaders over 
9 129 



I30 DEDUCTIONS FROM 

their troops, was found to be impossible 
of realisation, or at any rate it had to be 
restricted to the divisions. The latter 
became strategic units and were corre- 
spondingly developed; the army corps be- 
came in many cases an army-group, and 
the number of its divisions underwent 
constant fluctuation. The question of 
the expediency of the triple division of the 
higher units was relegated forthwith to 
the background in face of the imperative 
demands of the War. This is by no 
means a novel experience. Napoleon 
never hesitated to alter the number of 
divisions in his army corps. The latter 
were made up in accordance with the 
demands of the situation, the personality 
of the leader, and the number of subor- 
dinate units which were available. 

The War has demonstrated the neces- 
sity of equipping the infantry with a 
larger number of machine-guns than was 
provided for by us in time of peace. In 



THE WORLD WAR 131 

defensive warfare, as we have already 
pointed out, the tendency has been more 
and more to husband the reserves of men, 
and to wage the battle in the foremost 
line by mechanical means, machine- 
guns and mines, backed up by the artil- 
lery. The field artillery, whose duty it 
was to work in the closest co-opera- 
tion with the infantry, required not 
so much an absolute increase in the 
number of batteries as an increase in 
the number of batteries of howitzers. 
On the other hand, in the case of the 
garrison artillery, the engineers, the bomb- 
throwing companies, the railway, tele- 
graph, and motor troops, and the flying 
corps, a considerable increase has proved 
to be necessary. It will not be necessary 
to increase the numbers of the cavalry in 
the future; but the cavalry will doubtless 
have to be kept at its present strength, 
which will perhaps make it possible in a 
future war to manage with a smaller 



132 DEDUCTIONS FROM 

force of reserve cavalry, so that the men 
and horses will be available for other 
purposes. In face of modern firearms 
and mass-armies the cavalry is very 
much restricted in its opportunities for 
reconnaissance, and to a large extent it 
has been superseded by the aeroplane. 
None the less, this long entrenched war, 
and the fact that in the course of it this 
valuable weapon has only been employed 
in the same way as the infantry, must not 
lead us to form false conclusions. At 
the beginning of the War, in the West 
and, later on, in the East (especially in 
Lithuania), our cavalry have performed 
very valuable services, and the same may 
be said in regard to the campaign against 
Roumania. As soon as the War was 
carried into the open country, the cavalry 
at once asserted its importance. It be- 
comes indispensable both as a supple- 
ment to aircraft in reconnaissance at 
close quarters and also as a mobile de- 



THE WORLD WAR 133 

fensive weapon. Moreover, it is essen- 
tial to have a swiftly-moving arm which 
can be rapidly transferred from one place 
to another. At the same time, in the 
training of the cavalry in time of peace, 
due attention must be paid to trench- 
warfare, and far more attention must be 
devoted to fighting on foot than has 
hitherto been the case. 

In our great manoeuvres the conditions 
of this World War can only partially be 
represented. The manoeuvres will, of 
course, be more adapted to the present- 
day mode of fighting, and since, on our 
drilling-grounds, trench-digging is only 
rarely feasible, we shall practise it in the 
manoeuvres, provided that it is in accord- 
ance with the situation which has been 
arranged, and provided that it can be 
effected without injury to the fields. In 
other respects, however, it will not be 
possible to organise our great manoeuvres 
in the future in conformity with the 



134 DEDUCTIONS FROM 

conditions which prevailed in the great 
majority of cases in this War. We can- 
not in our peace manoeuvres furnish a 
representation of trench-warfare on a 
large scale. All that we can do is to 
practise attacks on a field-position oftener 
than has hitherto been the case. Their 
number and extent, however, must al- 
ways be comparatively limited by a con- 
sideration of the expense which they 
involve. Hence all that we can do is to 
give the companies and battalions a 
thorough training in trench-warfare and 
make them familiar with all the circum- 
stances which it engenders. In the case 
of our frontier forces, the requisite train- 
ing could be combined to a large extent 
with the construction of new fortifica- 
tions. This would incidentally effect an 
economy of civilian labour. Also portions 
of the troops stationed in the interior of 
the country might be dispatched tem- 
porarily to the frontier for this purpose. 



THE WORLD WAR 135 

It will always be our task to see that 
we preserve correct views in respect to 
trench-warfare, but that at the same 
time we do not give it the predominant 
place in our training. The predominant 
place — it cannot be insisted on too often 
— belongs to the war of movement, 
though in a somewhat different form from 
that with which we were familiar before 
the War. 

In this connection there should be a 
greater insistence, in our peace training, 
upon the dragging out of operations 
which is inevitable in war, provided, that 
is to say, that this can be done without 
prejudice to the freshness of the troops 
and the initiative of their leaders. As 
early as 1861 Moltke wrote": 

"If manoeuvres are not to engender 
false notions, full consideration must be 
given to the ground and the dimensions. 

' Bemerkungen iiher den Einfluss der verbesserten Fetter- 

waffen. 



136 DEDUCTIONS FROM 

The whole course of the battle will 
thereby become different and slower.'* 

These words, which were written long 
before 1866, have received very little 
attention. In an order of King William 
issued after the Battle of Gravelotte- 
St. Privat he says: 

"I must remind you that the attack 
on an enemy position must first be pre- 
pared for by the artillery and by well- 
directed rifle-fire. ... I certainly accord 
the fullest recognition to the brave assault 
of the infantry, for whom hitherto no 
task has seemed too difficult, but I also 
expect that the intelligence of the officers 
shall enable them in future to reap the 
same successes at a much less consider- 
able sacrifice, by dint of a skilful exploita- 
tion of the ground, a more thorough 
preparation for the attack, and the 
employment of suitable formations." 

Similarly, at the beginning of the 
present War, many of the engagements 



THE WORLD WAR 137 

might have developed more tranquilly 
and systematically and at less cost of 
life, and at the same time have reaped 
more decisive results. None the less, we 
may rejoice that the following words of 
Clausewitz are completely applicable to 
our infantry: ** Happy the army in which 
an untimely boldness frequently mani- 
fests itself; it is an exuberant growth 
which shows a rich soil.'" We must 
endeavour to maintain, by every means 
in our power, this splendid vigour in 
attack of our infantry. The infantry 
must not expect the artillery to do every- 
thing; just as little, of course, must it 
attack prematurely in such a manner as 
to render it impossible for the artillery 
to exercise its full effectiveness at the 
right moment. Hence it will be an 
important duty of the commanding offi- 
cers in future peace manoeuvres to see 
that their troops preserve clear notions 

' On War, i., 187. [Vom Kriege, III. B., 6 Kap.] 



138 DEDUCTIONS FROM 

concerning the seriousness, the scope, 
and the duration of present-day warfare, 
and at the same time to emphasise con- 
tinually the effectiveness of modern arms. 
Co-operation between the infantry and 
the artillery must in any event be ensured. 
A good means of achieving this would be 
to effect a mutual interchange between 
the officers in command of the infantry 
and the artillery respectively. 

Generally speaking, we must devote 
more attention to tactics on a large scale, 
and less to strategy. Above all, even in 
sham fights and cavalry manoeuvres, the 
important thing is not to spin out great 
strategic theories, but to develop the 
power of forming a just conception of 
purely tactical situations on a simple 
plan, and to practise the technique of 
command. Operations on a large scale 
must be left for the tours of the General 
Staff — especially the Great General Staff. 
Certainly it is desirable that just concep- 



THE WORLD WAR 139 

tlons regarding operations on a large 
scale should also be instilled into the 
generality of the officers' corps; but in 
this respect the study of the World War 
and lectures upon it will afford a rich 
field of instruction and inspiration. The 
greatest possible simplicity, such as war 
demands, must also prevail in regard to 
the exercises practised on the drilling- 
ground. 

Our traditional drill must in any event 
remain the permanent imperishable foun- 
dation of our training. 

"Its importance consists in the fact 
that it inspires the soldier with a sense 
of the urgent necessity to obey his officer. 
The habit of obedience which is de- 
veloped by means of military service 
helps to produce this effect.'" 

The War has confirmed in the fullest 
degree the value of drill. We have to 

^Reisner v. Lichtenstem. Die Macht der Vorstellung 
im Kriege. Berlin, 1902. 



140 DEDUCTIONS FROM 

thank our permanent military training 
schools for the discipline which has made 
it possible to solve the most difficult 
problems of attack and defence with an 
array of masses of troops. It is the 
result of these schools that the German 
soldier has not recoiled before any task. 
The best proof of this is the half-reluctant 
recognition which it has extracted from 
the enemy. 

In regard to the autumn battle of 1915, 
in Champagne, General Cherfils writes^: 

*'The French soldier detaches himself 
from his officer far too readily. Each 
one goes where he wills. Thus it came 
about that our infantry lost in a moment 
territory which they had just won with 
great difficulty, and, moreover, they left 
on it a half of their man-power. The 
German is a true soldier. Discipline 
has become a part of his flesh and blood. 
That is his greatest source of strength." 

' Echo de Paris, November 23, 1915. 



THE WORLD WAR 141 

The France Militaire writes^ with re- 
spect to the Anglo-French offensive on 
the Somme in July, 19 16: 

"The great homogeneity of the German 
army is evident from the fact that it was 
possible for the German command to 
withdraw some twenty different battalions 
from at least ten divisions, in order that 
they might oppose these improvised for- 
mations to the Anglo-French offensive. 
And these troops were drawn from all 
portions of the front. This was, to be 
sure, only an emergency measure. The 
Germans certainly would not have had 
recourse to it if it had not been necessary, 
and we must try not to bring ourselves 
into a similar situation, and we must 
always bear in mind that the mainten- 
ance of the formations is an element of 
victory. At the same time, it is a sign 
of great homogeneity and of a splendid 
co-operation between the various com- 

' July 16, 1916. 



142 DEDUCTIONS FROM 

mands that it was possible for the Ger- 
mans to undertake such a manoeuvre on 
such an extensive scale and in the space 
of a few hours. 

"The opponents of a long term of 
active military service and of thorough 
preparation in time of peace should con- 
sider the following facts: A militia army 
with an abridged term of training may 
perform heroic deeds, the regiments may 
exhibit a high standard of cohesion, but 
such an army will lose all its strength if 
circumstances compel it to break up its 
principal units, and to blend these to- 
gether. It is only where uniformity of 
training has penetrated into the lowest 
ranks, and where a thorough military 
training has been established, that such 
venturesome undertakings are feasible.** 

In the case of the numerous new forma- 
tions which the enormous increase of our 
army in the course of the War has ren- 
dered necessary, we have always endeav- 



THE WORLD WAR 143 

oured, as far as was possible, to compose 
these new bodies of troops in such a way, 
and to furnish them with such a thorough 
training, as would give them the solidity 
of the old troops. In August, 1914, in 
the case of the newly-formed Reserve- 
Corps, we had to endeavour to dispense 
with these advantages. In their case, 
the period of training was not really 
adequate to transform them into thor- 
oughly efficient battle-troops. The ex- 
perience of the officers, very few of whom 
were on the active list at the time, with 
all their good will, was not really ade- 
quate, and the same was true in many 
cases in respect of their physical fitness. 
This applies equally to a large proportion 
of the men in the ranks, that is to say, 
of the young war-volunteers. They had 
excellent qualities, and were filled with 
the purest patriotic enthusiasm; but this 
could not compensate for the lack of 
soldierly discipline and physical harden- 



144 DEDUCTIONS FROM 

ing which can be acquired only in the 
course of a thorough military training. 
These new troops could not be equal to 
coping with the difficult conditions which 
prevailed at Ypres. They have only 
gradually, in the course of the War, and 
as a result of the subsequent improvement 
of their officers' corps, been brought up 
to the level of the old troops. The Prus- 
sian Landwehr of 1813 furnished an 
illustration of exactly the same thing. 
They broke down, at the beginning of the 
campaign, at Goldberg, Kulm, and in 
the pursuit after the battle of Katzbach; 
it was not until Wartenburg and Mock- 
ern, and after they had been very much 
diminished in the process, that they had 
become thoroughly efficient troops. 

Scharnhorst, their creator, had not 
originally contemplated the employment 
of the Landwehr as a troop of the first 
line. It was only necessity which led 
to the enrolment of the Landwehr among 



THE WORLD WAR 145 

the field-troops; just as in August, 1914, 
necessity compelled the German com- 
mand to throw in on the right wing of the 
Western army troops which were not yet 
fully trained. 

The zeal of reformers, after the defeats 
of the year 1806, undoubtedly contrib- 
uted to make the difference between the 
old and the new In the Prussian army 
appear much greater than it actually was. 
Scharnhorst and his disciples frequently 
overshot the mark deliberately, in order 
to attain their purpose, for they were 
under the necessity of overcoming a 
host of prejudices on the part of those 
who adhered to the externals of the Fred- 
erician tradition, and not to its inner sig- 
nificance. This, however, does not in any 
way alter the fact that it was really the 
resuscitated old Prussian army, though 
filled with an entirely new spirit, that we 
have to thank for the liberation of 18 13. 
It was the same much-abused officers' 



146 DEDUCTIONS FROM 

corps, the "Junkers" of the year 1806, 
who led to victory an army the best parts 
of which were composed of veteran sol- 
diers. The great achievements of the 
army of 18 13 in the face of the enemy were 
due to the excellence of its cadres, and 
the same was the case a century later. 
The achievements of the War of Libera- 
tion, like our ability to hold out in the 
World War, were only rendered possible 
by the fact that a sufhcient number of 
experienced officers and veteran soldiers 
were available, for even the men of the 
home and reserve regiments of 18 13 had 
for the most part already served in the 
old army. 

The value of the so-called "Kriimper" 
system introduced by Scharnhorst has 
been hitherto very much exaggerated. 
It can by no means be described as a 
successful attempt to manage with a 
short term of service on a large scale. 
The principle of it was the creation of a 



THE WORLD WAR 147 

war reserve which should always be avail- 
able, by means of a constant furloughing 
of a number of men to the districts from 
which the regiments had been drawn and 
the insertion of recruits in their place. 
Nevertheless, in the brief period between 
1808 and 1 8 13 (during which, moreover, 
the mobilisation of half the standing 
army for the auxiliary corps which had 
to be supplied for Napoleon's campaign 
of 181 2 against Russia was a disturbing 
factor) this system proved incapable of 
furnishing anything like such a strong 
war reserve as that which in 18 13 made 
it possible, in addition to filling up the 
ranks of the regular troops, to create 
fifty-two reserve battalions, which were 
assembled in regiments during the truce. 
By far the greater part of the imposing 
reserve force which was available in the 
provinces consisted of soldiers who had 
received their training in the old army and 
had been subjected to its rigid discipline. 



148 DEDUCTIONS FROM 

The words of Camille Rousset^ in re- 
ference to Napoleon's new formations of 
the year 1813 are more or less true of 
every improvised army: 

**If the Battle of the Katzbach had 
been fought by stout men and thoroughly 
trained soldiers, it is possible that Mac- 
donald would not have been defeated, or 
at any rate would have suffered only 
such a reverse as could have been made 
good again; fought as it was with young 
men and with soldiers whose training 
dated from yesterday, it became the 
beginning of a catastrophe. No clearer 
demonstration has ever been furnished of 
the power of physical and moral energy, 
of fortitude of body and spirit in the face 
of inclemency of the weather, hunger and 
thirst, and all the sufferings of war, the 
power, in fact, of that stoicism which is 
no sudden phenomenon, but the gradual 
and unconscious result of military train- 

' La Grande Armee de 1813. Paris, 187 1. 



THE WORLD WAR I49 

ing, which is in fact nothing else than a 
heightened sense of honour and duty." 

The American Civil War of the sixties 
of last century would not have lasted 
four years if the Union had had at its 
disposal an efficient fighting army with 
which to overcome the Southern States. 
Both the militia and the volunteer levies 
broke down. Only after a long time did 
theybecomereally efficient fighting troops. 

Lord Kitchener's creation of a strong 
English army during the World War was 
unquestionably an immense achievement. 
He built up twelve divisions out of the 
six regular divisions existing before the 
War, and twenty-eight divisions out of 
the fourteen very imperfectly organised 
territorial divisions. This doubling of 
the hitherto existing English army was 
then supplemented by the thirty so-called 
Kitchener divisions. All these new for- 
mations, before they were put into the 
line, went through a long period of train- 



150 DEDUCTIONS FROM 

ing, first at home and afterwards behind 
the front in France. The long entrenched 
warfare afforded the possibiUty for this. 
They were only by degrees sent into the 
fighting lines. Not until the beginning 
of 1916 were the English in a position to 
take over longer sections of the front, 
which had hitherto been held by the 
French. They were subsequently rein- 
forced in France, and at the beginning of 
19 17 their lines were extended still fur- 
ther towards the south. Thus, though 
the great English army of the World War 
is a new creation, it is anything but a 
loose and hasty improvisation. The ex- 
perience which could be derived from 
military history in respect to improvised 
armies was, on the contrary, thoroughly 
taken into consideration by Kitchener 
in accomplishing his task. The advo- 
cates of a shorter term of service than 
existed among us before the War cannot 
in any case instance the Kitchener di- 



THE WORLD WAR 151 

visions as a justification of their views, 
any more than they can do so in the case 
of our own new formations during the 
War or those of earher times. More- 
over, it has to be considered that the 
Kitchener divisions were trained exclu- 
sively for the simple tasks of trench- 
warfare. The English army is by no 
means fit for a war of movement. Cap- 
tured English officers have admitted this 
fact. Their higher officers lack the ne- 
cessary knowledge, which can be acquired 
only by long training and by regarding 
it as a life-task. Napoleon said, not 
without reason, "It is possible to capture 
a strong position by means of a young 
army, but not to conduct a campaign to 
a victorious conclusion." 

In regard to the abridgment and simpli- 
fication of our Infantry Regulations there 
may be various opinions. The War 
certainly furnishes a great deal of instruc- 
tion on this subject. Military drill in 



152 DEDUCTIONS FROM 

itself is, however, prejudicial to war- 
efficiency, and consequently a hindrance 
to true preparation for war, only when 
it is carried to excess, that is to say, 
when the insistence upon formal drill is 
pushed beyond the limits of the Regula- 
tions. Provided that this is avoided, 
military drill — the War has proved it 
beyond any doubt — is entirely beneficial 
as regards training for active service. 
In regard to the latter, in a short time 
and by equally simple means, the same 
degree of subordination cannot be en- 
forced under all conditions; for though 
undoubtedly much of what the infantry 
soldier has to learn in respect to the use 
of the rifle in warfare may be drilled into 
him, yet the Regulation of 1906 (No. 158) 
expressly indicates as the aim of the indi- 
vidual training of the rifleman that "the 
soldier should be trained to become an 
intellectually self-reliant and technically 
conscientious rifleman," for on one point 



THE WORLD WAR 153 

there can be no doubt, namely, that 
training with a view to actual fighting 
must always take the first place, great as 
is the value of rigorous drilling in achiev- 
ing this end. This training engenders in 
the troops the habit of doing their best, 
and hence of doing it even in the face of 
danger. It helps them, too, to acquire 
that ''proud and distinguished appear- 
ance" which was insisted upon by Prince 
Frederick Charles. 

Here as everywhere, the real question 
is how much importance is to be conceded 
to formal drill. The important thing 
to be kept in mind is that drill is to be 
considered, not as an end in itself, but 
only as a means to an end. It is inevit- 
able that it should happen from time to 
time that a few individual pedants, who, 
moreover, have not kept the prospect of 
war steadily in view, should go astray. 
It will be the duty of the superior ofiicers 
in charge of these matters to see that 



154 DEDUCTIONS FROM 

these deviations do not lead us too far 
away from the proper goal of all training. 
It will be their duty to see that it does 
not happen that — to use a phrase of 
Scharnhorst — "the mechanical heads 
triumph," and they must constantly 
bear in mind that success in war falls 
only to him who is capable of emancipat- 
ing himself from the bonds of custom 
when the occasion demands. 

We must not carry too far our cult of 
tradition. Blind adherence to tradition 
in the place of a living continuous de- 
velopment is an evil. A great and proud 
tradition is a wonderfully invigorating 
thing in an army, and nothing can take 
the place of it, but it ought not to be 
nurtured for its own sake, but for the 
sake of the firmness and stability which 
it gives to the army as a whole. 

The years of exhaustion which followed 
the great war-period at the beginning of 
the nineteenth century were not calcu- 



THE WORLD IVAR 155 

lated to inspire a warlike spirit in the 
Prussian army and to shape its training 
with a view to the needs of war. Hence 
a pronounced tendency in the direction 
of review tactics very soon manifested 
itself. This phenomenon has frequently 
occurred after wars of long duration, and 
it is easily understandable. But it is all 
the more important that we should be 
on our guard against its reappearance. 
The ambition of Frederick the Great 
to see that "admirable discipline" of his 
troops, which had become relaxed in the 
course of the Seven Years' War, once 
more restored allowed him to overlook 
many an extravagance which the re- 
surgent drill-devil provoked in the army. 
His own thoughts, as his later writings 
prove, were always concerned with the 
needs of actual war and the most glorious 
side of the soldierly profession, but his 
generals became more and more immersed 
in the minor arts of the drilling-ground. 



156 DEDUCTIONS FROM 

The uneventful course of the Bavarian 
War of Succession was not calculated to 
diminish the pedantry of peace drill. 

The tendency in the direction of review 
tactics, which again became predominant 
in the first decades following the War of 
Liberation, had begun to manifest itself 
in a peculiar way during the war, even 
in the Prussian army, and first of all in 
the Guards. It was our brotherhood in 
arms with the Russians which resulted 
in the marked predominance of parade 
drill (as though it were not a means to 
an end, but in itself the end of training), 
and with it a tendency to triviality. 
The manoeuvres in the environments of 
Berlin were, under Frederick William 
III., merely spectacles; they degenerated 
for the most part into mere military 
sports. The Tsar Alexander and his 
brothers all took the same unspeakable 
delight in military pedantry, and it 
could not but happen that, in view of the 



THE WORLD WAR 157 

intimate ties of blood and friendship 
which existed between the Courts of 
Petrograd and Berlin, similar tendencies 
should have been transmitted to Prussia. 
Thus that training which had been origi- 
nally derived from Prussian models, 
though endowed with greater rigour after 
the manner of the Tsar Paul, which, more- 
over, was organised entirely with a view 
to outward show in a manner quite op- 
posed to the old Prussian models, was 
reintroduced into Prussia in this distorted 
form. 

Under Scharnhorst's general rules for 
manoeuvres on a large scale, pre-arrange- 
ment of the course the manoeuvres were 
to take was declared to be inadmissible; 
but, after the great war-period, parade 
manoeuvres, the critical moments of which 
were exactly planned out beforehand, we re 
once again revived. The brief and con- 
cise Regulations of 18 12 seemed to those 
in charge of military affairs too simple 



158 DEDUCTIONS FROM 

for peace-time. General Krauseneck, a 
distinguished collaborator in the drawing- 
up of the Regulations and afterwards 
Chief of the General Staff, discovered, 
when he took over the command of a 
division in 1821, that quite a number of 
supplementary orders had been added, 
and he found himself compelled to protest 
against them. He writes^: 

"We had never doubted that time and 
the experience of war might entail altera- 
tions, and that simplifications might be 
effected, but we never dreamed that the 
Regulations — in which we had aimed at 
the greatest possible brevity and clear- 
ness, as one of the most essential require- 
ments — would, after a war which had 
been conducted to a glorious conclusion, 
be criticised as insufficiently detailed 
and precise. It is not only useless, it is 
harmful, to aim at excessive hair-splitting 

' Malachowski. Scharfe Taktik und Revuetaktik. Berlin, 
1902. E. S. Mittler und Sohn. 



THE WORLD WAR 159 

preclseness in the case of every order, 
and to strive after uniformity with a 
scrupulousness that borders on pedantry. 
Such a uniformity can never be attained, 
and, even if it could be attained, it 
would not repay the trouble and energy 
expended upon it.'* 

General Krauseneck was of opinion 
that uniformity in matters of detail was 
rather injurious than otherwise, and he 
insisted that the greatest possible freedom 
as regards the means for attaining the 
desired end had the result of infusing 
spirit and energy into the men. 

Fortunately it was not to happen that 
the "mechanical heads" should triumph 
once again in the Prussian army, as 
Scharnhorst had feared. The conditions 
had been completely altered since 1806. 
The introduction of universal service 
entailed on the officer educational duties 
which had not fallen to him in the old 
army. Also, although the army did not 



i6o DEDUCTIONS FROM 

have an opportunity of gaining new experi- 
ence of war on a large scale, the dangerous 
tendencies with which it had become in- 
fected were none the less successfully 
overcome. In this connection valuable 
service was rendered by the Prince of 
Prussia. His clear understanding in re- 
gard to military matters enabled him to 
form a very just estimate of the limits 
within which a rational training by means 
of drill ought to be confined, and this at 
a time when a one-sided training, with 
a view principally to the requirements of 
parades, seemed still to be completely 
in the ascendent. In notes which he 
made in the year 1840,' the Prince laid 
down principles which still hold good at 
the present day. He wrote: "The sole 
purpose of the drilling-ground is, in my 
opinion, to achieve order. If the spirit 
of order exists in a troop, it is possible 

' Militdrische Schriften Kaiser Wilhelms des Grossen. 
I., No. 336ff. Bemerkung zu einer Denkschrift Boyens. 



THE WORLD WAR i6i 

to do anything with it; without order 
nothing is possible." The parade step, 
and the preparatory practice for it, the 
Prince held to be indispensable, "if," 
he says, "we are to have troops and not 
a mere assembled mob." Thus the 
Prince assigned to the parade the import- 
ance which properly belongs to it, and 
to which it can justly lay claim even at 
the present day. A very careful train- 
ing by means of drill is an indispensable 
preparation. Therefore, in the same 
notes, the Prince says further in regard 
to drill: "Uniformity is indispensable. 
Why should one be permitted to do his 
task well, and another to do it badly? 
. . . Either we intend to have a trained 
troop or else a mob of undisciplined men. 
That is a point which must be settled." 
Further he says that the objectionable 
term "Trillen" is constantly applied to 
what is really no more than soldierly 
discipline, as opposed to rustic clownish- 



i62 DEDUCTIONS FROM 

ness. The future Emperor expressed 
very finely his firm and unshakable con- 
fidence in the efficiency of the army for 
purposes of war when he said that suspi- 
cions ought not to be entertained concern- 
ing the spirit of the army merely because, 
in addition to its actual achievements, 
it presented a handsome outward ap- 
pearance. "Any one who has had to 
do with the army for twenty years will 
have only one opinion on this head, 
namely, that the spirit and the will of 
the army are above all praise, and that 
such an esprit de corps exists in it as 
never before." 

It was not prejudice in favour of what 
was old and accustomed, nor mere rou- 
tine, that caused the German army to 
preserve its "handsome outward appear- 
ance," but the recognition, based upon 
history, that any negligence in this 
respect constitutes a serious danger. 
Archduke Albert of Austria, in 1869, 



THE WORLD WAR 163 

drew attention to the existence of such a 
danger in "the efforts of a subversive 
Press to turn to ridicule the discipline 
and strict regulations which are indis- 
pensable in every army/" In the fifties 
of last century the stimulating influence 
of Prince Frederick Charles made itself 
felt in the Prussian army. It was par- 
ticularly effective, because here was the 
case of a royal prince who made it his 
aim to plan the training and education 
of the soldier directly with a view to 
actual warfare. The Prince succeeded 
in overcoming a far too narrow-minded 
preference for parade-drill and the af- 
fectations of the drilling-ground, although 
he insisted that a certain stiffness was 
in harmony both with our traditions 
and with our national character, and 
was also a good means of instilling 
discipline. 

" It is the warlike spirit that decides," 

' Ueber VerantwortUchkeit im Kriege. 



i64 DEDUCTIONS FROM 

wrote the Prince in 1858,^ ** not the tactical 
form. The form must be elastic ; It must 
not exercise compulsion in a certain 
direction. Every epoch has had its spe- 
cial tactical forms, and these have been 
connected with the warlike spirit of the 
age and with the nature of its equipment 
for war. . . . The more developed the 
warlike spirit in the individual soldier, 
the greater will be the energy of the whole 
mass, and the less will be the influence of 
the tactical form." 

The importance which Prince Fred- 
erick Charles attached to the mutual re- 
lations between the leader and the troops 
is evident from the following words 
which he wrote In the year i860. He 
says^: 

"The general Is the loved and respected 
chief, not a scolding, punishing task- 

' Wolfgang Foerster. Prinz Friedrich Karl von Preuss- 
en, Denkwiirdigkeiten aus seinem Leben. I., p. 170. 
Stuttgart imd Leipzig, 1910, Deutsche Verlagsanstalt. 

' Ibidem, i., p. 219. 



THE WORLD WAR 165 

master. When he addresses his troops 
(which he should do only seldom) all 
hearts beat faster. He must know how 
to touch those chords which produce a 
fine ring. He is pleasant and friendly 
with all his subordinates, and the more 
so according as they are the farther re- 
moved from him in rank. He has always 
a friendly word and a sympathetic greet- 
ing for the man in the ranks. Although 
they seldom see him at his work, and then 
only accidentally and when he rides past 
them, they none the less delight in his 
near presence and they are proud of him. 
He has rendered both the men and their 
ofl[icers susceptible to the inspiration 
which his presence, his glance, his words, 
and his bearing must infuse into them on 
the day of battle, and which must result 
in a trebling of their efforts. If then, in 
the fulness of their enthusiasm, they 
ask him eagerly, 'Sire, where is it your 
will that we should die.?' then and only 



i66 DEDUCTIONS FROM 

then has he succeeded in making the 
right impression upon them in time of 
peace." 

That this impression was actually pro- 
duced in our army In the sense which the 
Prince intended has been proved by the 
World War, for never was the question 
which he desired uttered with a more 
sublime devotion than it has been by our 
troops during this War. 

There has been much talk in Germany 
of the so-called trench-spirit, and of the 
fine comradeship between officers and 
men. But it has been overlooked that 
this comradeship, based upon the loyal 
solicitude of the officers for their men, 
existed also before the War. It was 
merely expressed in a different way. The 
officer must make a difference in his 
behaviour towards the younger troops, 
who have to be trained and disciplined, 
and his behaviour towards the fully- 
trained and. In particular, the older men. 



THE WORLD WAR 167 

whom he has to lead against the enemy. 
Moreover, it is only natural that, in the 
face of death, a greater equality should 
prevail between superiors and subordin- 
ates. But the officer stands just as much 
above his subordinates in the trenches as 
elsewhere. The lack of officers after the 
heavy losses in August, 19 14, made itself 
very seriously felt, and even men who had 
been brave hitherto failed occasionally 
when the enemy fire suddenly deprived 
them of their leaders. Good relations 
between officers and men will and must 
remain after the War, but they must 
not be such as to be prejudicial to the 
authority of the superior officer. Our 
young men, who have outgrown paternal 
discipline in the course of the War and 
have rendered splendid services before 
their time, will stand in very special 
need of the rigorous training afforded by 

the army. 

The officer must be "of that ruling 



i68 DEDUCTIONS FROM 

race who exert a controlling influence, 
even if momentarily they are not within 
sight or hearing/'^ Field-Marshal Count 
Schwerin once declared that Fear and 
Love were the two instruments by which 
the soldier must be governed, and then 
added — and with manifest justice as 
applied to his time — that unfortunately 
Fear had to perform the lion's share. 
The case has, however, unquestionably 
been reversed as regards our age. Prince 
Frederick Charles, even in his day, would 
have nothing to do with the ** scolding 
and punishing taskmaster."^ Without 
dependence on the personality of the 
superior officer (though, of course, this 
presupposes a wholesome rigour in the 
latter), without enthusiasm for the work 
in hand, the results of military training 
will be merely superficial. The World 

' Reisner v. Lichtenstem. Schiessaushildung und 
Feuer der Infanterie im Cefechi. Berlin, 1895. E. S. 
Mittler und Sohn. 

^ See p. 164. 



THE WORLD WAR 169 

War has demonstrated how very import- 
ant It is that we should preserve all that 
military discipline which has proved 
its efficacy, but that at the same time we 
should enlist the services of the best men 
for this task. 

"It is unjust to depreciate the reserves 
from the industrial districts and the big 
towns as compared with those from the 
rural districts. The latter may perhaps 
be endowed with greater physical fitness 
and endurance, but as regards those apti- 
tudes in regard to present-day methods 
of warfare and the use of modern techni- 
cal weapons for the purposes of war, 
which must be possessed even by the 
man in the ranks, the urban population, 
in view of their quicker intelligence, 
will undoubtedly possess certain advan- 
tages."' 

If, before the War, certain prejudices 

' Freytag-Loringhoven. Die Grundbedingungen kriege- 
rischen Enjolges. 1914. E. S. Mittler und Sohn. (The 
War has completely justified this view.) 



170 DEDUCTIONS FROM 

on this head existed in the officers' corps, 
they have perished as the result of the 
War, equally with many others. It is 
our duty to concede full recognition to 
the human personality in all our troops. 
Present-day social conditions, no less 
than the achievements of our national 
army as a whole in the course of the War, 
demand this. A national army cannot 
be other than a democratic organisation. 
The task of the officers is in high degree 
a social task — social, that is to say, in an 
aristocratic sense; for what has rendered 
our army so efficient has been precisely 
the thoroughly aristocratic organisation 
of the officers* corps upon a democratic 
basis. 

Prince Biilow says very justly in re- 
ference to Scharnhorst's army reforms: 

"Through the material of the national 
army, an institution of a democratic 
nature, runs a thread of the modern 
aristocracy. The happy thought of mak- 



THE IVORLD WAR 171 

ing entry into the corps of officers con- 
tingent upon election by the corps of 
officers made it possible in the structure 
of the national army to take account of 
the structure of the nation. Probably 
nothing in the past, as in the present, has 
to such a degree assured the superiority 
of our army as the fact that the leading 
position, which is the natural due of those 
who rank highest in intellect and educa- 
tion, has been retained by them in the 
army. . . . The World War has shown 
that devotion and contempt of death are 
the common heritage of every German 
soldier. But it has also been a song of 
praise of mutual confidence between 
officers and men, such as the world has 
never seen. . . . The spirit of German 
militarism, as Prussia first developed it 
and Germany adopted it, is every whit as 
monarchical as it is aristocratic and de- 
mocratic, and it would cease to be Ger- 
man and the mighty expression of German 



172 DEDUCTIONS FROM 

imperial military power and military 
efficiency if it were to change. If our 
enemies, to whom with God's help our 
militarism will bring defeat, abuse it, 
we know that we must preserve it, for 
to us it means victory and the future of 
Germany."^ 

The War has brought about an almost 
complete fusion of the officers' corps of 
the active army with the officers on the 
reserve list. We had fully recognised 
the importance of the tasks which, in 
case of war, must fall to the officers of 
the Reserves and the Landwehr, and for 
more than a decade prior to the War we 
had devoted special care to their training. 
This precaution has reached a rich reward. 
During the War, wherever the condi- 
tions made it possible, this training has 
been continued — especially in the case 
of the younger officers who had recently 

» Imperial Germany, pp. 154-6. London, Cassell & 
Co., Ltd. [Deutsche Politik, 1916, pp. 163-4.] 



THE WORLD WAR 173 

obtained their captaincies — by means 
of numerous courses of instruction organ- 
ised behind the front. Though very 
satisfactory results were achieved by 
this means, it ought none the less to be 
borne in mind that only in connection 
with the officers' corps of the active army 
and under its guidance were the officers of 
the reserve able to render such valuable 
services to the Fatherland. The long 
duration of the War brought it about 
that the memory of their civilian calling 
became more and more effaced. They 
were completely absorbed into the organic 
entity of the troop; they became pro- 
fessional soldiers equally with the men; 
they acquired a training which they had 
lacked in peace-time, when their adoption 
of the profession of arms had been only 
an incidental experience. To the pro- 
fessional knowledge, which they gained 
in an increasing degree, was added all 
that intelligence and energy which char- 



174 DEDUCTIONS FROM 

acterlse the German whenever he occupies 
a responsible position in a civilian calling. 
Thus the officers of the reserve soon ex- 
hibited no longer any difference from the 
officers of the active army. They may 
have exhibited less familiarity with rou- 
tine duties, but this was equally the case 
with the younger officers of the standing 
army, who lacked for this purpose the 
necessary experience of active service, 
brilliant as was the example which they 
furnished to their troops during battle. 

Moreover our regiments were com- 
manded by staff officers who were con- 
siderably younger both in years and in 
experience of military service than was 
customary before the War in the case of 
these positions. We shall not see such 
young commanders in time of peace. This 
will not be prejudicial to the army, for in 
time of peace the qualities demanded 
from the commander of a regiment, in 
respect to the training of the officers' 



THE WORLD IVAR 175 

corps and the inner consolidation of the 
troop, are somewhat different from those 
required in time of war. In time of 
peace we need for this position fully- 
matured and self-assured personalities. 
On the other hand, it is just the officers 
occupying the middle status of regimental 
and battalion commanders who have been 
subjected to a severe strain in this War, 
a fact which should warn us not to allow 
officers to occupy these positions in peace- 
time after they have reached a certain 
age. 

It proved advantageous and necessary 
not only to promote many excellent non- 
commissioned officers to officers' rank, 
but also frequently to extend the sphere 
for the replenishment of the officers' 
corps, in the case both of the regular 
army and the reserves, very considerably 
beyond the limits customary in time of 
peace. In doing this many prejudices 
were set aside, often with very beneficial 



176 DEDUCTIONS FROM 

results. At the same time it ought to 
be borne in mind that, in peace-time, no 
matter how insistently direct preparation 
for war is put in the first rank of import- 
ance, none the less all kinds of claims 
are made upon the officers which disap- 
pear in time of war, and therefore the 
choice of persons suitable for the position 
of officer is necessarily confined within 
narrower limits. We need not take into 
account here the question of pecuniary 
circumstances, but education, intellectual 
bias, and ambition do not suffice to render 
every individual fit for the position of 
officer. 

The spirit of German militarism, which 
has enabled us to stand the test of the 
World War, and which we must preserve 
in the future, because with It our world- 
position stands or falls, — which, moreover 
is "every whit as monarchical as It is 
aristocratic and democratic," — rests ulti- 
mately on the building up of an officers' 



THE WORLD WAR 177 

corps which shall be thoroughly efficient 
for purposes of war. For this purpose a 
sound aristocratic tradition is of the high- 
est value. This is in no way connected 
with so-called Junkerdom and caste- 
feeling. Even in the case of the army 
of the young North American Republic, 
Washington demanded that only "gentle- 
men" should be given a commission. 
Aristocratic tradition, in the wider sense, 
is of the utmost service in the training of 
personalities. No profession stands in 
greater need of the latter than that of the 
officer. The choice of the most suitable 
man can, however, only be satisfactorily 
accomplished by means of the gradual 
replenishment of the officers' corps, and 
not by the arbitrary placing of all on the 
same level. 

The warlike efficiency of the ruling 
class in Japan was essentially the result 
of the tradition which lived in the old 
Samurai families. Even the army of the 



178 DEDUCTIONS FROM 

first French Empire, in spite of the demo- 
cratic notions which Unked it with the 
time of the Republic, none the less did 
not lose all its connection with the army 
of the ancien regime. Napoleon made it 
his immediate endeavour to develop a 
new chivalry in his army, and to fill up 
the ranks of his officers from the families 
of the old nobility. In spite of the intense 
revolutionary and national feeling, re- 
publican tendencies alone could not have 
endowed the armies of the Revolution 
with the necessary stanchness. It was 
only the development of a military hier- 
archy and its consolidation in course of 
time, combined with the leadership of 
Napoleon and the great aims which he 
held up before his army, that raised the 
latter to supreme war-efficiency. 

In any case the masses, as such, can 
never rule. If mob-rule is consequently 
an absurdity in a State, how much more 
so is it in an army. The army which 



THE WORLD WAR 179 

Russia now proclaims to be a national 
army Is by no means efficient for purposes 
of war. The words of Treltschke are 
significant here: 

"A Republic Is confronted with still 
more serious difficulties In the matter of 
a standing army. All history has shown 
that such an army, whose commissioned 
ranks are imbued with definite class feel- 
ings, will always be monarchlcally In- 
clined."^ 

Only under the absolute command of 
a war lord can an army achieve a really 
vigorous development. It cannot be em- 
phasised too often what an immense 
debt the Prussian army — and therewith 
all Germany — owes to the Prussian Kings. 

Napoleon declared, when he was at 
St. Helena: ''Armies are monarchical 
through and through."^ This had been 

' Heinrich v. Treitschke, Politics, vol. ii., p. 299-300. 
London, Constable & Co. Ltd. New York, The Mac- 
millan Company. [Politik, II., p. 275.] 

^ Gourgaud. Ste. Helene, i. 



l8o DEDUCTIONS FROM 

clearly exhibited in his own army, above 
all in the Imperial Guard, and in the 
spirit which animated the latter. The 
achievements of the French army under 
their great Emperor, and, equally so, 
those of the last world war, rested on a 
surer foundation than the Spectateur 
Militaire^ with its empty phrase-monger- 
ing, was willing to admit, when it de- 
clared at the beginning of the sixties of 
last century^: 

"The French soldier sees in all his 
officers, from the sub-lieutenant to the 
marshal, merely his equals; he has the 
clear and certain conviction that he is 
inferior to them only in military rank. 
Neither training nor education nor birth 
produces an essential difference between 
them. The sense of equality is so strong 
that the sense of the ego completely 
disappears under the absolute domlna- 

' Quoted from Jahns, Das Jranzosische Heer von der 
grossen Revolution bis zur Gegenwart. Leipzig, 1873. 



THE WORLD IVAR i8l 

tion of the law of discipline. To what 
enemy could such soldiers be inferior? 
What human might could successfully 
resist such soldiers as these, soldiers who 
stand on an equality with their officers 
and who are all heroes?" 

This is an instance of that thoroughly 
French notion of the supreme blessing of 
equality. How little it really signifies, 
and how far it is from being equivalent 
to freedom, has been demonstrated by the 
World War. Instead of a truly liberal 
State, we see in the French Republic a 
country enslaved by a plutocracy and 
governed by the arbitrary will of its 
English ally. Moreover, every army 
should esteem itself fortunate in possess- 
ing its own particular notion of discipline. 
We have in any case had sufficient experi- 
ence of the blessings which our own dis- 
cipline brings in its train to the welfare 
of the German Fatherland, and we intend 
to hold fast to it in the future. 



i82 DEDUCTIONS FROM 

Since the reforms of Scharnhorst, it has 
been a principle with us that the officer is 
raised above the men in the ranks both 
by education and training. Since the 
standard of education of the mass of the 
people has been considerably raised during 
the last hundred years, it is only logical 
that higher demands should be made 
from the officers in this respect than was 
the case at the time of the War of Libera- 
tion. Only there must be general re- 
cognition of the fact that this education 
does not by any means consist in the 
piling up of a mass of learning. The 
school education of our youth must be 
such as to furnish them with a sound 
foundation on which to build up later 
their knowledge of life. Experience has 
taught us that the dispute about the 
superior merit of a humanistic education 
as a preparation for life is really of very 
little importance. The former pupils of 
the various educational establishments do 



THE WORLD WAR 183 

not exhibit any marked differences from 
one another as the result of their training, 
and this for the reason that a man begins 
really to learn only after he has left 
school. Not till then does he perceive 
things in their true relations; provided 
only that his school has furnished him 
with a basis upon which to build up his 
further knowledge. The War, which has 
reduced so many things to their true 
value, has also revealed clearly the differ- 
ence between genuine education and mere 
acquisition of knowledge. Every one 
among us who has talked with our sol- 
diers, whether at home or in the field, 
has found reason to rejoice in their sound 
judgment. Often one could not help 
feeling that their simple understanding 
had preserved a higher degree of impar- 
tiality and freshness than is commonly 
to be found in the so-called educated 
classes. This was, of course, by no means 
a new experience for any officer who had 



i84 DEDUCTIONS FROM 

known how to find the way to the hearts 
of his men. The modest learning of 
those who have been educated in elemen- 
tary schools and have not had a complete 
secondary education is frequently more 
thorough as far as it goes, provided that 
they are endowed with intelligence and 
the desire for knowledge. They are 
contented, according to their lights, and 
frequently give evidence of an astonish- 
ingly profound cultivation of the qualities 
of the heart, and this is in fact the true 
source of their courage and steadfastness 
in time of trouble. Those who have had 
the benefit of an academic training have 
certainly not the smallest reason to look 
down upon such men as these. 

In the second volume of his History of 
Germany during the Nineteenth Century, 
Treitschke says, concerning the period 
following the Wars of Liberation: 

"Because they avoided that soul-de- 
stroying education which provides a 



THE WORLD WAR 185 

smattering of everything, the classical 
schools succeeded in kindling in their 
pupils an enduring delight in classical 
antiquity and the desire for a liberal and 
humane culture. Moreover, as yet, that 
disease of modern universities, the exami- 
nation-craze, was almost entirely un- 
known. Those old and famous homes of 
classical learning, the Fiirstenschulen of 
Saxony and the convent schools of Wiirt- 
temberg, sent on their senior scholars to 
the university, as soon as it seemed to 
their teachers that they were ripe for 
this, and the State made no objections."^ 
Since the year 1882, when Treitschke 
wrote these words, many improvements 
have been made in our higher education, 
and Treitschke himself admits that the 
system of regular State examinations, 
which has existed in Prussia since the 
time of Frederick William I, even if it 

' Heinrich von Treitschke. Deutsche Geschichte im 
IQ Jahrhunderi. Vol. ii., p. lO. 



i86 DEDUCTIONS FROM 

is more mechanical, is at the same time 
more equitable, and Is, in fact, a necessity 
in the case of a big State. The meaning 
of this foremost champion of Germanism 
is, however, obviously this, that a liberal 
and humane education Is not absolutely 
bound up with the passing of the leaving 
examination. 

We shall do well In the army If we 
endeavour, as hitherto, to see to it that 
as large a number as possible of ensigns 
and cadets shall pass their leaving ex- 
amination before they enter the service; 
on the other hand, In view of the pre- 
eminently practical nature of their calling, 
we need not demand this unconditionally 
of the officers. This should, at any rate, 
be left to time, especially as the higher 
schools will have to endeavour to sim- 
plify their curriculum by reducing the 
number of subjects. A consideration of 
the increased demands which will un- 
doubtedly have to be made upon our 



THE WORLD WAR 187 

young men in respect to physical culture 
will in itself necessitate this. This ap- 
plies to the modern schools and to the 
upper modern schools (especially to the 
latter) just as much as to the classical 
schools. The younger seats of learning, 
in their anxiety to raise themselves to 
the educational level of the classical 
schools, have frequently lost sight of the 
fact that it is they above all who should 
devote their attention to training with a 
view to practical life and not with a 
view to a high standard of scholarship. 

These questions may appear to have 
little to do with the War, and it would be 
narrow-minded to endeavour to make con- 
siderations which have resulted from the 
War the basis of our educational system. 
No one, however, will dispute the fact that 
the World War has given us cause to sub- 
ject our national life to a thorough ex- 
amination in all its departments and that 
it must mark the beginning of all kinds of 



i88 DEDUCTIONS FROM 

new developments. Moreover, the training 
of our youth is more or less closely related 
to the development of our armed force. 

In the case of the education of a future 
officer, the same demands need not be 
made as in the case of a young man who 
intends to devote himself to learned 
studies, or to the investigation of techni- 
cal problems. It must, however, be such 
as not only to qualify him for the training 
and leadership of his men, but, above all, 
it must give him that self-assurance in 
dealing with any situation, which is 
required of an educated man. In regard 
to the further education of the officer, 
intellectual development in all the de- 
partments which directly or indirectly 
concern the soldierly profession is of 
great importance in relation to his mili- 
tary duties, but first and foremost in 
importance is the training of character, 
the cultivation of a distinguished mode 
of thought. In the time of Napoleon, 



' THE WORLD WAR 189 

it was said that every one of his soldiers 
carried the field-marshaFs baton in his 
knapsack. With us this is true, in a 
metaphorical and a better sense, of every 
officer. He can and must strive to at- 
tain that *' harmonious combination of 
abilities" which Clausewitz declared to 
be the characteristic of military genius. 
Thereby he will guard himself against 
narrow-mindedness and the danger of 
that mechanical mode of thought which 
the predominance of technical science 
at the present day is apt to induce. 

"Technical science and inward culture, 
or even human happiness, have little 
connection with one another. In the 
midst of vast technical achievements, it 
is possible for humanity to sink back 
into complete barbarism." 

This opinion, which was expressed by 
Professor Werner Sombart,^ in spite of 

' Die Deutsche Volkswirtschaft im ig Jahrhunderi, 
3d edn., p. 134. Berlin, Georg Bondi. 1913. 



I90 DEDUCTIONS FROM 

his high appreciation of the progress of 
technical science in other respects, has, 
unfortunately, been to a large extent 
confirmed by the World War. The officer 
must possess a thorough appreciation of 
technical science, but this must not mis- 
lead him into neglecting the study of men. 
Knowledge of men is the fundamental 
condition of successful leadership. Hence 
the study of history — above all of military 
history — is of the highest value. It is 
an inexhaustible source of instruction, 
an unequalled source of consolation in 
the midst of the monotony which is an 
inevitable circumstance of service in time 
of peace, for it keeps the eyes fixed at the 
same time on the grandeur and sublimity 
of the soldier's calling, and it encourages 
that just appreciation of the moral ele- 
ment in war which in the course of a long 
peace is apt to be lost sight of. 

Field-Marshal Count Schlieffen, in the 
latter years of his life, expressed his 



THE IVORLD WAR 191 

regret that he had not been able earHer, 
before he became Chief of the General 
Staff, to spare the time for the study of 
mihtary history which he could now de- 
vote to it. "Despise mere reason and 
abstract science," he said once, placing 
his hand upon a book which lay before 
him, while he expressed his opinion of 
those who imagine that they can do 
anything merely with the aid of their 
own experience. And at the Centen- 
ary celebrations at the Staff College 
he uttered the following memorable 
words: 

"Before everyone who wishes to be- 
come a commander-in-chief, there lies a 
book entitled The History of War. It is 
not always, I must admit, very amusing. 
It involves the toiling through a mass of 
by no means exciting details. But by 
their means we arrive at facts, often 
soul-stirring facts, and at the root of it 
lies the perception of how everything has 



192 DEDUCTIONS FROM 

happened, how it was bound to happen, 
and how it will again happen." 

The General Staff, which had been 
educated in the school of this man, has 
done him no discredit. His training has 
up^to the present triumphantly stood the 
test to which it has been subjected in 
this War. Not only have the officers 
of the General Staff shown themselves 
capable of filling much higher positions 
than those for which they were intended 
in respect of age and length of service; 
but also for numerous appointments on 
the General Staff it has been necessary 
to have recourse to officers who before 
the War were still at the Staff College, 
or to those who, in the course of the War, 
had proved their worth as adjutants 
attached to the higher staffs. The very 
substantial augmentations of the large 
troop-units during the War necessitated 
this. The fact that these officers have 
proved themselves equal to their tasks 



THE WORLD WAR 193 

is in itself a convincing argument on 
behalf of that uniform mental training 
with a view to war which prevailed in 
the army before the War, and which 
extended far beyond the limits of the 
General Staff. The heritage of Field- 
Marshal von Moltke was well admin- 
istered and added to in the hands of 
Schlieffen. And Schlieffen's successor, 
Colonel-General von Moltke, not only 
rendered great service by increasing our 
armed force ; he also rendered the further 
service that he always realised the im- 
portance of training the officers of the 
General Staff with a view to war, and 
that he steadily and clearsightedly pur- 
sued this end. 

Not only at the Front and on the 
higher staffs have the officers of all arms 
shown themselves equal to their tasks, 
but also behind the Front, on the lines 
of communication, and on home service, 
where they have filled positions of author- 



194 DEDUCTIONS FROM 

ity for which they had received no real 
training. Regular officers, half-pay offi- 
cers, and officers of the reserve have 
equally held their own; and the explana- 
tion of this lies in the fact that all mili- 
tary efficiency is nothing less than the 
exercise of sound human intelligence. 

A consideration of these facts may well 
afford us satisfaction and be accounted a 
proof that we have worked on the right 
lines in all these departments, but it must 
not lead us into imagining that we have 
reached the pinnacle of perfection. Here 
also it will be necessary later on to build 
upon the basis of the new experiences we 
have gained. We must not overlook the 
fact that the long duration of the War, 
and, in part also, the stationary condi- 
tions which it engendered, furnished all 
those who took part in it with abundant 
opportunity for training and study and 
rendered it easier for them to become 
familiar with the duties of their positions. 



THE WORLD WAR 195 

On the other hand, the World War has 
revealed the variety of the tasks which 
may devolve upon the officer in war, 
tasks^for which, as far as is possible, 
he must be prepared in time of peace. 
Therefore a deepening as well as an ex- 
tending of his professional training is to 
be aimed at. A training at the Staff 
College will never be possible for more 
than a limited number. The War Schools, 
even if (as is urgently to be desired) their 
course of training is extended over a 
longer period and their programme of 
study somewhat enlarged in scope, none 
the less cannot furnish more than a 
foundation for the special knowledge 
which the officer must possess and which 
he must afterwards acquire. This after- 
training was before the War for the most 
part left completely to the individual. 
But not everyone is capable of achieving 
it unaided, especially in the department 
of military history, which can never be 



196 DEDUCTIONS FROM 

more than skimmed over in the War 
Schools. 

Therefore it seems desirable that an 
intermediate stage between the War 
School and the Staff College should be 
established, in the form, say, of nine- 
month courses, which it would be obli- 
gatory upon all the senior lieutenants to 
attend. The mere fact that, during the 
World War, the regular course of training 
in the War Schools has had to be replaced 
by an abbreviated course makes such an 
institution very desirable, since it may 
prove impossible to arrange that all those 
who have been promoted to officer's 
rank during the long War should subse- 
quently go through the training provided 
in the War Schools. Those who had 
concluded their intermediate course with 
the greatest distinction would be sent on 
to the Staff College, at which in their case 
a two-years' course would suffice. By 
this means, the Staff College would be 



THE WORLD IVAR 197 

able to confer the benefit of its instruc- 
tion upon a number of picked officers 
larger than that customary hitherto by^ 
a third as much again. The Staff Col- 
lege will remain, as before, the special 
nursing-ground for the General Staff, 
the higher adjutancy, and the military 
teaching-staff. The other officers, who, 
after the completion of the above-men- 
tioned nine-months' course, go back to 
the Front, will in any case have gained 
the advantage of a more thorough educa- 
tion, both as regards special training for 
their profession and general culture. 

In order to achieve this, it would be 
'advisable that these institutions should 
be established in university towns, so 
that the services of the professors who 
would there be available might be turned 
to account. This world economic War 
has revealed the necessity that officers 
should make themselves so far familiar 
with political, constitutional, economic. 



198 DEDUCTIONS FROM 

and social questions as to enable them 
to form an independent judgment about 
these subjects. The character of the 
v/hole modern life of our State makes it 
desirable that the officer should keep 
himself in touch with these questions, 
though he need not for that reason be- 
come a politician. Frederick the Great, 
even in his day, wrote: "I expect above 
all that a general shall be an honest man 
and a good citizen of the State; without 
these qualities, all his ability and all his 
skill in war will be rather harmful than 
profitable."^ By this the King implies 
that military science and political sci- 
ence are closely related. We must con- 
trive to kindle in the officer, while he is 
still young, an interest in this relation, 
so that he may be capable, in the train- 
ing of his men, of enlightening them 



• General-Prinzipien vom Kriege. Von denen Talents, 
welche ein General hahen muss. Taysen, Friedrich der 
Grosse. Militarische Schriften, p. io6. 



THE WORLD WAR 199 

from time to time upon questions of civic 
and economic life. Short, well-written 
primers might be of great value here. 

That "untiring application" which 
King Frederick demanded from his officers 
and which has also always been demanded 
of us, must be insisted on more than ever 
after the War. Its intellectual side Is 
by no means the least important. The 
training of the mind by assiduous study 
is a necessity not only for the officers of 
the General Staff, but also for those who 
wish to occupy with advantage any high 
position in the army. We have no use 
for officers with a scholastic training, 
but we do need officers with well-trained 
minds. Napoleon felt keenly the lack 
of such, and, even at St. Helena, he 
placed the Austrian General Staff above 
his own.^ As long as theory does not 
set Itself — to use the words of Clausewltz 
— "In opposition to intelligence," it can 

' Gourgaud, Ste. HSline, ii., p. 416. 



200 DEDUCTIONS FROM THE IVAR 

only be useful, for it is then no longer 
theory in the vulgar sense. Even the 
talent of the most famous representatives 
of the military art — Frederick the Great, 
Napoleon, and Moltke — had a theoreti- 
cal foundation, but this foundation con- 
sisted only in education of the mind, 
which had been developed and enlarged 
as a result of their own experience of life 
and of war. In any case, the important 
thing can never be the encouragement 
of purely theoretical knowledge in the 
army, but rather the transforming of 
knowledge into practice. Willisen^ has 
said justly: "It is always a long step from 
knowledge to ability to act, but none the 
less it is a step from knowledge and not 
from ignorance." 

' Theorie des grossen Krieges, 



VI 

STILL READY FOR WAR 

The war-readiness of Germany had 
been very much increased by the votings 
of the last great Army Bills, together 
with the carrying out of the programme 
of naval construction. And yet we have 
been obliged to organise new formations 
on a very large scale, and to develop our 
armaments industry to an extent which 
had never been anticipated. The levy 
on capital of a thousand million marks, 
measured on the scale of the costs of the 
War, now no longer seems to us the enor- 
mous sacrifice which caused doubts as 
to whether it could be demanded of the 
German people. The War has, on the 
one hand, revealed to us the full financial 
strength of Germany; but, on the other 



202 DEDUCTIONS FROM 

hand, it has proved that additional ex- 
penditure on the army at the right time 
would have been profitable. We should 
then have saved in this War not only 
milliards of marks, but in all probability 
we should have had to offer up a far less 
considerable sacrifice of men. In view 
of the central position of the Fatherland, 
larger expenditure on the land-army, in 
addition to the necessary expenditure on 
the fleet, was absolutely essential. The 
demands which in this connection were 
put before the Reichstag were but a 
feeble minimum of what was really de- 
sirable, as the World War has proved. 

The fact that in peace time the high 
demands of the Army Estimates en- 
countered all kinds of objections, must 
certainly not be overlooked, more espe- 
cially in view of the fact that it is easy, 
in the case of a war the vast extent and 
long duration of which could not have 
been foreseen, to declare after the event 



THE WORLD WAR 203 

that our armaments were not sufficient. 
The fact, however, still remains, and it 
is important that we should not lose 
sight of it, for we have to learn from it 
the lesson that in future we must dis- 
regard every objection, and must see to 
it that the disproportion between the 
credits which are asked for and what has 
to be done in case of war shall in any 
case never again be so great as it was in 
the World War. By means of the last 
Army Bills, which called to the colours 
a number of men fit for service whom it 
had not been possible to enlist hitherto, 
we had already before the War taken 
steps to restore to compulsory military 
service the character of universality which 
belonged to it under law, but which, 
with the increase of the population, just 
as formerly in Prussia prior to the army 
reforms of 1859, threatened more and 
more to be abandoned. We shall have 
to continue to pursue this road in future. 



204 DEDUCTIONS FROM 

quite apart from the necessary increase 
of garrison artillery and technical troops. 
Moreover, when the number of those who 
have fought in the Great War has dwin- 
dled, we shall have to aim at subjecting 
at least to a cursory training the men of 
military age who are at first rejected, 
but who in the course of the War have 
turned out to be fit for service, so that, 
when war breaks out, they may form 
a generous source of reserves. Only so 
can we arrive at a real national army, 
in which everyone has gone through the 
school of the standing army. 

In the case of those who have enlisted 
at the age fixed for military service, it 
will not be possible to reduce the length 
of the prescribed term of service without 
detriment to the strength of our whole 
army of organisation as tested in the War. 
Periods of leave might, indeed, be granted 
during the second or third years of ser- 
vice. The chief task of all our associa- 



THE WORLD WAR 205 

tions of young men will be to qualify for 
enlistment in the army larger numbers of 
those liable to service than has been the 
case hitherto. In addition to the train- 
ing which they afford our youth both 
from a physical and an intellectual point 
of view, these associations will, precisely 
in view of the nature of present-day war- 
fare, which demands in a high degree 
sportsmanlike qualities, manual skill, and 
technical knowledge, form an excellent 
preparatory school for the army. They 
cannot, however, furnish a substitute for 
actual military training. 

It may be asked. What is the use of all 
this? Will not the general exhaustion of 
Europe after the world conflagration of 
a certainty put the danger of a new war, 
to begin with, in the background, and 
does not this terrible slaughter of nations 
point inevitably to the necessity of dis- 
armament to pave the way to permanent 
peace ? The reply to that is that nobody 



206 DEDUCTIONS FROM 

can undertake to guarantee a long period 
of peace, and that a lasting peace is 
guaranteed only by strong armaments. 
Our own armament, although it may 
have been defective in some respects, has 
none the less secured peace for us for 
forty years, that is to say, for such a 
length of time as has hardly ever before 
been experienced in the world's history, 
in the case of a great country. More- 
over, world-power is inconceivable with- 
out striving for expression of power in 
the world and consequently for sea-power. 
But this involves the constant existence 
of a large number of potential causes of 
friction. Hence arises the necessity for 
adequate armaments on land and sea. 

A sound policy of power is by no means 
equivalent to a one-sided glorification of 
war. It is true that the effects of war 
are in many respects very beneficial. 
War banishes pretence and reveals the 
truth. It produces the most sublime 



THE WORLD WAR 207 

manifestations of masculine personality, 
and the greatest devotion and self-sacri- 
fice for the sake of the community. If 
ever an age has corroborated the words 
of Treitschke that "the features of 
history are virile,"^ it is the present, and 
we, Germans have been described by a 
Swede as '^the most powerful military 
nation in the world's history."^ But 
this does not in any way alter the fact 
that the effects of war are terrible ; nay, 
that, judged by these, war seems to civil- 
ised men absolutely senseless, in view 
of the sacrifice and destruction which it 
entails, and of the misery which it brings 
in its train. And, none the less, however 
convinced we may be that war is a sin 
against humanity, that it is something 
worthy of detestation, this conviction 

' Heinrich v. Treitschke. Politics, vol. i., pp. 20-21. 
London, Constable & Co., Ltd.; New York, The Mac- 
millan Company. [Politik, i,, p. 30.] 

^ Fredrik Book. Deutschland und Polen, p. 14. Mun- 
ich, 1917. 



2o8 DEDUCTIONS FROM 

brings us no nearer to eternal peace. 
War has its basis in human nature, and 
as long as human nature remains unal- 
tered, war will continue to exist, as it has 
existed already for thousands of years. 
The often quoted saying of Moltke that 
wars are inhuman, but eternal peace is a 
dream, and not even a beautiful dream, 
will continue to be true. The World 
War has also fully confirmed the justice 
of the following words of Heinrich von 
Treitschke: "The polished man of the 
world and the savage have both the brute 
in them. Nothing is truer than the bibli- 
cal doctrine of original sin, which is not 
to be uprooted by civilisation, to what- 
ever point you may bring it."^ A long 
peace, such as that which preceded the 
World War, had frequently caused us to 
overlook the fact that it was not the fine 



^ Heinrich von Treitschke. Politics, vol. i., p. xl. 
London, Constable & Co., Ltd.; New York, The Mac- 
millan Company. [Politik, i., p. 9.] 



THE WORLD WAR 209 

» 

phrases about international bliss and 
brotherhood uttered on every occasion 
at public meetings which preserved us 
from war, but the might of our sword 
which was only fully revealed on the out- 
break of war. And it will only be by 
this might that we shall be able to safe- 
guard our peace in the future. 

We misconstrue reality, if we imagine 
that it is possible to rid the world of war 
by means of mutual agreements. Such 
agreements will, in the future, as in the 
past, be concluded from time to time 
between States. The further develop- 
ment of international courts of arbitra- 
tion, and the elimination of many causes 
of dispute by their agency, lies within 
the realm of possibility, but any such 
agreements will after all only be treaties 
which will not on every occasion be 
capable of holding in check the forces 
seething within the States. Therefore 

the idea of a universal league for the pre- 
14 



2IO DEDUCTIONS FROM 

servation of peace remains a Utopia, and 
would be felt as an intolerable tutelage 
by any great and proud-spirited nation. 
Here, too, let us heed Treitschke's warn- 
ing when he says: "The idea of one uni- 
versal empire is odious. The ideal of a 
State co-extensive with humanity is no 
ideal at all. In a single State the whole 
range of culture could never be fully 
spanned."^ The fact that it was pre- 
cisely the President of the United States 
of North America who advocated such 
a brotherhood of nations must in any 
case arouse our wonderment. America's 
behaviour in the War has shown that 
pacifism, as represented in America, is 
only business pacifism, and so at the 
bottom nothing else than crass material- 
ism. This truth is not altered by the 
fact that it is wrapped in a hazy garment 



' Heinrich von Treitschke. Politics, vol. i., p. 19. 
London, Constable & Co., Ltd.; New York, The Mac- 
millan Company. [Politik, i., p. 29.] 



THE WORLD WAR 211 

of idealism and so seeks to hide its real 
significance from unsuspecting minds. 
Nor is the truth altered by the appeal to 
democratic tendencies, for precisely this 
War is showing that those who at present 
hold power in the great democracies have 
risked in irresponsible fashion the future 
of the peoples entrusted to their guidance. 
In any event, as regards us Germans, 
the World War should disencumber us 
once and for all of any vague cosmo- 
politan sentimentality. If our enemies, 
both our secret and our avowed enemies, 
make professions of this nature, that is 
for us sufficient evidence of the h5rpocrisy 
which underlies them. 

No one can foresee future developments, 
least of all while such a war as the present 
is still in progress. Hence it is not im- 
possible that pacifist tendencies, based 
upon motives of utility, may gain cur- 
rency to a certain degree, but they will 
not conduce to the betterment of human- 



212 DEDUCTIONS FROM THE WAR 

ity. We find it impossible to believe in 
the realisation of genuine pacifist ideals, 
such as are cherished by well-meaning 
sentimentalists. Only a spiritual trans- 
formation of the human race could bring 
this about, and how far we are from any 
such transformation has been revealed 
by the War. Therefore, in regard to 
this question, we should pay less heed 
to the phrases of present-day prophets 
than to the views of old and truly wise 
men. We must not put might before 
right, but equally little shall we and can 
we dispense with might. In the future, 
as in the past, the German people will 
have to seek firm cohesion in its glorious 
army and in its belaurelled young fleet. 



Ji Selection from the 
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G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS 



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I. Treitschke's Life and Work, by Adolf 
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more powerful than Droysen; and he writes 
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but he concerns himself with the problems of 
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ing solution." 



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Edited, with a Topical and Historical Introduction, by 

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By J. Holland Rose, Litt.D. 

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Talopment of the European Nations," " The 

Personality of Napoleon " 

In this volume the author traces the course of the politi- 
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the subject being treated under the following headings: 
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